Dante’s Politics of Love
In 2016 I started to write on the internal music in Dante Alighieri’s Comedy, under the title of Dante’s Sweet Symphony of Paradise. After completing that work in 2017, I discovered Francesco Ciabattoni’s book Dante’s Journey to Polyphony from 2010, which I found to cover the same ground in greater detail. I therefore proceeded to broaden and deepen the scope of my original study, foregrounding the politics and ethics within a philosophical framework of ‘rational freedom.’ I also added a commentary on The Comedy. The result is a vast text, which seems to contain three or more books colliding with one another, making it hard to discern a unifying thread for readers to follows. It is there, but requires shaping and crafting.
I have worked hard to meet the deadline for publication, but the effort to bring some kind of order to the materials has resulted in exhaustion and severe eye strain. Either I leave the work for a few months, and maybe lose the possibility of publication, or find a willing helper or helpers.
The brief is to reduce the 1,000,000 words to something like 150,000, the 3,000 pages to 500 pages, in accordance with a coherent plan. It will be a case of reading to identify the very best passages and cutting the rest, leaving text for me to rewrite and present for publication. I have made a start in editing by highlighting the best text in yellow. The text in grey has yet to be read, but contains good material. The grey text has been written this year – some 290,000 words in one month (hence the eye strain and exhaustion). The text in green is decent, the text in blue is useable, but can be cut. The text that is unhighlighted can also be cut. In fine, there is probably a mere 750,000 words to read.
Rationale
In the effort to identify a clear theme and tell a compelling story, I have formulated the material into this table of contents:
1) Introduction – theoretical and practical reason, freedom as appreciation of necessity (reconciling subjectivity and objectivity); the desire for knowledge and the desire for communion; human beings as truth-seekers and meaning seekers. The importance of holding justice in the heart. introduction to key themes;
2) Why read Dante today? Freeing Dante from his fourteenth century intellectual and institutional determinations. Dante’s continuing relevance. just a brief section would suffice;
3) The problem - Disorder : The diremption of the contemporary world – loss of social and moral connection – moral, social, and civic bonds (trust relations). The infernal world of ‘Morality and Modernity’ –– the loss of social bonds and the loss of morality; the death of God as the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework (Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’). this is material that could be reduced drastically to just a statement on issues of contemporary concern;
4) Dante’s Background : Florence and the civic context; From Poetry to Philosophy; Dante’s political intent as a writer; political career and exile;
5) Order: Metaphysics and Music: Music and Numbers – from redemption to the creative universe; the well-tempered order – importance of measure – Dante’s Christian music of the spheres. The Disgodding of the Earth and the Untuning of the Skies, link to alienation/rationalisation/mechanisation above as a diabolic inversion
6) Modes of Persuasion – rhetoric, language, poetics – the motivational economy – the ecology of the heart.
7) Rational freedom - Politics and ethics – the formal works of political philosophy, the Convivio and the Monarchia.
8) Inferno – the city of dismisura
9) Purgatorio – a transitional community of conversion and change
10) Paradiso
11) Walking and Talking with Dante – endless conversation on the ‘unending road’ – Dante dialogues across time and place.
The book adopts a tripartite structure of the real, the ideal, and their mediation. Proceeding from a critique of the actual, the attempt is to bridge the gap between theoretical reason (the Convivio, the Monarchia), and practical reason (the various practices of The Comedy), mediated by modes of persuasion and motivation (rhetoric and poetics, the De Vulgari Eloquentia). In this understanding, the Inferno is presented as a praxis of evil and estrangement, the Purgatorio as a practice of reconnection, conversion, and community, the Paradiso as connection).
Basically, the theoretical reason of the Convivio and the Monarchia, dealing with values and principles, and the practical reason of The Comedy, dealing with human experience, choice, and action and interaction is mediated by the modes of persuasion contained in the rhetoric, language, and poetics.
I have broken the material up into five books:
1) The Sweet Symphony of Paradise - Music and Metaphysics 554 pages 178,916 words;
2) Dante's Politics of Love - Politics and Ethics 689 pages 218,709 words;
3) The Comedy – From the Dark Forest to the Eternal Rose with the Heart of Gold - 1063 pages 318,122 words
4) Rational Freedom - to be partners in the ceaselessly creative universe 634 pages 228,956 words
5) Walking and Talking with Dante – Conversations on the ‘Unending Path’ – personal and public response and reception over time and place 210 71,186 words.
The breakdown of these books into their headings gives some idea of the content:
1) The Sweet Symphony of Paradise - Music and Metaphysics 554 pages 178,916 words;
The Musical Model – The Foundations of Dante’s Rational Freedom page 2
The right order of things page 4
Objective reality and objective morality 8
Transcendent Standards 22
Music and Numbers 22
The Way of Love – Trinitarian Communion - The Threefold Pattern 25
numbers – Pythagoras 38
truth and beauty 44
The One and the Many 49
numbers – ratio and proportion 53
numbers – the Pythagorean tradition, Plato, St Augustine, Boethius, Bonaventure 55
numbers – the virtue of numbers 63
numbers – numerology in Dante 68
numbers – numerological thinking 71
numbers – Dante beyond numerology – innate love 75
The Musical Model 95
The Metaphysics of Music 95
Music measures the relation to God 96
The well-tempered harmony 97
the musical journey 98
Philosophical and Religious Perspectives on Music 113
The Origins of Music 126
Music as the Profoundest Expression of Nature 137
the music of poetry 140
the musical origins of language and poetry 141
the Singing Neanderthals 141
the singing body 146
The Physiological and Psychological Effects of Music 146
The Spirit of Song 150
the attunement of mind and body 153
The musical anthropology 154
music, responses, emotions 156
music and responsiveness – the failure to hear the music 156
Dante and Music 158
Dante’s love of music 158
The structure of the musical transition in the Comedy 162
The musical structure of the Comedy 169
The structure of the musical transition in the Comedy 172
The centrality of music to the universe 178
Dante and the Music of the Spheres 181
The Fathers of the Church 203
Aristotelianism, or the Silent Cosmos 212
Harmony and Political Order 236
Platonic Ecology 238
Dante’s Physics and Politics of Harmony 242
Ancient Chinese views of Harmony 249
music and good connotation - Confucius, beautiful music and the harmonious society 253
attunement as harmony 257
Ethical Definition of Music 258
deep harmony as open 261
The inner music of The Comedy – Dante’s Musical Model 269
The music that is beyond rational comprehension 270
the metaphysical attributes of music - notions of true order, relations and reality 287
distinction between the natural and the human, and the artificial and the instrumental 288
the diabolic music of the Inferno 295
The Inferno as a world of disorder and disharmony, chaos and cacophony 317
Purgatory - poetry comes back to life - the renewal of life 321
Purgatorio: Musical Liturgy as Pharmakon 324
Healing Songs: Music as Pharmakon 332
The Siren Song 348
Purgatory as the place of dreams 356
Hymns in the Valley of the Princes 358
Beatitudes and the Songs of the Earthly Paradise 367
The restoration of Earth to Edenic Golden Age 374
The mystic procession 380
The Paradiso: The Attuning of the Sky 388
emanation in Paradise 392
the idea of a heavenly harmony setting a template for harmony on Earth 392
polyphony as an allegory of harmony on Earth 395
Paradise as a realm beyond the normal senses 396
Polyphony as Political Harmony 396
Cosmological reality 396
The special love of each in their natural movements 399
Creation 420
The craftsman 429
Imagery of Water, Light, and Bow 447
Unity and diversity 464
Polyphony in Paradise 472
Song and dance 488
Polyphonic performance 505
Gabriel's song to Mary surpasses any earthly melody 513
Music as liquid light 528
The Prime Archer 528
Love permeates the multitude of spheres constituting the universe 555
The God of Love 558
the Love that brings eternal joy 558
Climate Accord 565
fire and ice – Dante’s Inferno and Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of capitalist modernity 566
attunement with the grammar of harmony – the ordered world 589
Dante and Climate Accord 590
Love Beyond Proof 616
Physics, Facts, and the Greatest Love of All 625
Physics and the Mind of God 625
Beyond the empire of fact 625
2) Dante's Politics of Love - Politics and Ethics 689 pages 218,709 words
The Interconnection of Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante 4
Dante and Rational Freedom. 23
Dante’s Politics of Love 23
Poetics and Persuasion 26
The Ecology of the Heart 31
Bridging theoretical and practical reason 34
Dante’s Politics of Hope 40
Human Beings as truth-seekers 43
Free Necessity 50
Love and wholeness 63
The Desire for Communion 63
Quest for community 69
The Way of Love – Trinitarian Communion 82
The way of love is the invitation to hope 82
Holding justice in the heart 83
City citizen and community 88
Popular art and political intention 93
Modes of Persuasion 107
Rhetoric, Poetics, and Politics 107
Marvel and wonder 107
Wonder and knowledge 117
The Desire for Knowledge – Dante’s philosophy of truth-seeking 117
Knowledge and causation – the search for root causes 124
Philosophical anthropology – the search for man 127
From Poetry to Philosophy 132
Dante as love poet - ordering love to its true object 132
The philosophy of courtly love 136
Boethius’ Lady Philosophy 145
Beatrice and the Vita Nuova 158
Lady Philosophy 167
Politics and the Florentine Background - Dante and his City 175
The Myth of Community: Political Rhetoric and concepts of the city 178
Civics 178
Political Career and Exile 188
The ideal seen in exile 196
Poetics and Politics 201
The Curial Conception of Poetry 202
De Vulgari Eloquentia 205
Natural Language 207
From Edenic Unity to Babelic Diversity 207
Linguistic change, Babelic fragmentation, and political conflict 213
Political Philosophy 227
Factionalism and Tottering Thrones 241
The Need for Public Authority 247
The Diabolic and the Symbolic 253
The Infernal Politics of Separation and Division 255
Dante, politics and the city 262
The Civic Politics of Imperial Rule 263
The Principles of the State 271
City and Civics 271
The Public Intent of the Convivio 284
Natural and Rational Love 312
Nobility, virtue, and happiness 320
Injustice and Avarice 332
Dante and the Empire – redemption from within 346
The social philosophy of the Political Peace 347
The associative origins and principle of the state 347
The empire and the church 357
Truth and Freedom 386
Intellect, Will, and Freedom 387
The Human Likeness to God 395
The Radical Uniqueness of the Human Person 400
The Monarchia 404
Justice and Free-Will 419
The Principles and Institutions of the Political Peace 424
Peace and government 424
Citizens of the World Monarchia 439
Universal Empire ruling in peace 448
The divine origins of imperial peace 457
Dante and Maritain on World Government 470
The Church and State as communion and community 480
Covenant and contract 480
Church and state as communion and contract – The restoration of communion and community 83
The Political Letters and Dante’s Religious Radicalism 494
3) From the Dark Forest to the Eternal Rose with the Heart of Gold - The Comedy 1063 pages 318,122 words
From theoretical to practical reason 2
The Dialectic of Heaven and Earth 2
The Comedy – Structure and Design 18
Dante as an inherently political being 36
From disconnection to reconnection 39
cognitio experimentalis Dei 39
Old moral maps, the same moral geography 41
Happy homecoming 43
The Structure and the Story 45
the architectonics of the poem 47
Communion, Community, and Communication 51
Poetic leadership 51
Sacred Poem educates by power of language 52
The Love of Justice 56
Exile and separation 67
The education of desire 69
Political concerns in The Comedy 70
The Critique of the Church in The Comedy 75
Commerce and communication money and language 88
Introduction to the Inferno 102
Order and Structure in the Inferno 104
In the Enclosure of Hell 109
The moral system 110
The loss of right relations 115
The anarchy of Hell 116
The socio political framework of sin 117
Disordered love 121
The Politics of the Inferno 122
The Dark Wood 125
The Three Beasts 131
Virgil – The Public Guide 135
Beatrice’s concern for a friend 141
Paul and Aeneas – the nature of guidance 144
The Gates of Hell 150
Discord and Disorder 152
The Inferno – the world of anti-music 156
The Taxonomy of Moral Order – Virtues and Vices 184
Punishment and Penalty 186
The Love of Money 205
The City of Dis 206
Dis and Inorganic Wealth 211
The Seventh Circle – Violence 214
Descending into the Depths 214
Descent into aggression towards others 215
Heresy and factionalism 218
Violence Fraud and Treachery 228
Projection of violence 229
Hell is the place of petrified powers. 230
alienation and inversion 232
The Old Man of Crete 234
Sterility 239
Usury - Violence against possessions 241
Fraud and Geryon 242
Geryon and the rope girdle 242
Fraud and commerce 247
The Malebolge 248
Punishment - Hell as penalty 250
Falsifiers 295
The Towering Giants of Pride and Power 297
Towers of alien power 298
Treachery 305
Lucifer and the closed cold heart of Hell 314
The Frozen Lake 314
Introduction to the Purgatorio 331
The highest mountain 333
The System of Purgation 335
The order of sin 336
Mount Purgatory as Church 336
Mercy forgiveness freedom 337
Confession as truth telling 338
The Structure and Design of Purgatory 341
Clearing the mind and opening the heart 342
The Desire for Communion 342
Penalty 343
Reeducation – The Discipline of the Mountain 344
Learning to become citizens 349
The restoration of community 350
The social components of love 352
Purgatory place and structure – The Moral geography of the Earthly Paradise 354
The highest mountain 355
Poetry and the arts 359
Cato and the Moral Law 370
Entrance into Purgatory proper 373
Poets and politicians in the community of Ante-Purgatory 378
Farinata and factionalism 381
Sordello and the unifying force of language 381
Restoration of fellowship 382
The Restoration of Peace and Community 383
The Excommunicate 383
Peter’s Gate and the Seven P’s 392
Purgation as a social process 394
The Three Divisions of Purgatory 402
Pride envy wrath social sins of disordered love 403
Pride countered by humility 404
Envy countered by love 406
Mutual support over factionalism 407
Beyond Possession – the covetous and the gluttonous 408
Sloth 415
Virgil on Love and Free Will 417
The need to properly order love 418
Disordered love 420
The shift to spiritual wealth 421
Marco Lombardo and Free Will 437
Commerce and greed in a public context 438
the need for law and the supreme good 449
Language and Money – Marco Lombardo 452
The idea of words functioning as guides 454
The Community of Virtue - the habitus of virtuous practice 456
The Insubstantial Nature of the Soul 466
God as measure 467
Avarice 474
The Meeting at the Two Rivers - Leah and Rachel 486
Dante’s Crowning in the Earthly Paradise 488
Matelda 494
The Earthly Paradise 495
The Mystical Pageant 498
The departure of Virgil 507
Justice 523
Mystical Procession - church and state relation 534
Transcendence and reality 542
The challenge of the Paradiso 544
Paradise hard to visualize and conceptualize 545
Hell and Paradise as opposites 554
Uncharted waters and transgressive poetry 559
Love and justice in the ideal society 565
Transcendent standards - the otherworldly world of the Paradiso. 568
Secular and spiritual life 577
Beatrice in Paradise 581
Cosmological reality 590
The special love of each in their natural movements 593
sacred poem transformation as transposition and transfiguration 607
Interweaving within the Transcendent 614
the theological questions of Paradise 614
Formative Principles 629
Polyphony in Paradise 643
Trasumanar 645
Grouping of the souls 664
the peace of voluntary submission 687
Fame and glory for a just cause 708
The fusion of beings through justice 708
The fusion of beings through love 734
The bonds of civic fellowship 748
The leaders responsible for the common good in the higher heavens 755
Apostolic poverty 771
The Fighters for Justice in the World 771
Cacciaguida’s Florence 774
Love Justice – the Foundations of Loving Authority 799
The contemplative life 810
The Fixed Stars: Faith, Hope, and Love) 826
Theological examination 835
Dante sees the universe smile 854
The Trespass of the boundary - Adam 857
St Peter’s denunciation 859
Music as liquid light 869
The Prime Archer 870
combining intellect and love in the One 872
The Primo Mobile 876
The Departure of Beatrice 894
The Empyrean 895
The Eternal Rose with the Golden Heart 895
Bernard the final guide 895
Mysticism – the final one hundred lines 895
The Vision of the Trinity 895
The entire universe is contained in all its diversity in God. 895
the end of the poem – into the light – the failure of geometry 895
What it is that Dante sees 895
Paradise language conveys a vision beyond words 895
Love and Light 895
the spiritual centre of the universe – the end of Paradise 895
Dante’s Heartleap 895
heartleap - love as the unifying force 895
The Ecology of the Heart 895
The Eternal Love of the Living Liquid Light 895
Dante’s Poetic Invention 895
The Sacred Poem – the real and the rational 895
The Poetic Creation 895
Poetry as real – the power of Dante’s poetry 895
The Happy Ending Without End - the Endless Love 895
The Politics of Love 895
The Ideal Polity 895
The cry of justice from the wilderness 895
Rome the ideal city of Paradise 895
The vision of the Rose 895
Empyrean church and state 895
Paradise is conviviality. 895
Homecoming to a Divine Ecology 895
4) Rational Freedom - to be partners in the ceaselessly creative universe 634 pages 228,956 words
Dante and Transcendent Standards 1
Metaphysics and Politics
Materialism and Platonism 45
Transcendence and Contingency in Relation to the ‘Real World’ 45
Metaphysics and Morality 69
Transcendent Truth, Power, and Representation 91
Power, truth, representation 91
Reason, Culture and Transcendent Truths 91
The Theory of the Best Account 116
Rational Freedom, Right Relationships, alienation and idolatry 123
Idolatry and Fetishism 123
Dante and Rational Freedom 169
Order Unity Diversity 170
The Danteum – Medievalism, the Hierarchical order 170
frozen music as immobility of the Inferno – Paradise as music, light and love – critique of the Danteum 202
Dante’s Heartleap 208
Love Beyond Proof 215
The Physical and Moral Universe 233
putting fact and value together 234
Against naturalism and scientism 236
numbers – physicist and Dantista Margaret Wertheim against Platonism 255
The Two Concepts of God - the Physical and Moral Universe as One 273
the dissolution of morality into value judgements – the simplicity and unity of God 274
disenchantment and despiritualization 287
Creator God or Natural Creativity? 300
the Einsteinian "God" 327
Forbidden Knowledge 357
Dante the transgressor 357
the sacred beyond human invention 367
Dante the transgressor in desire to see the face of God 367
Bacon and science 376
apprehending our invented symbols – living as if we knew 376
philosophical reason undercuts itself 376
the secret – against reinventing the sacred 384
Nietzsche, enveloping illusion, and disenchanting analysis 388
Transcendent Reason and Pragmatism 405
fulfilment of the soul’s desire – eccentricity beyond control 413
the illusions of being in control and of being in charge – letting go of neurosis 429
Be still and know 456
the dancer and the dance – getting in tune 458
the musical model in politics 458
Unity and Diversity 460
a world in union and in motion - P.B. Shelley – unity and diversity 463
Poetic Invention and Real Fiction 472
The Politics of Love and Justice 476
functional order – differentiated power 479
the ascending theme of power and government 479
diverse ranks coming to render sweet harmony 486
functional order – the just society and love divine 488
unity in diversity – the politics of the common good 489
Alienation and Rationalisation 509
Dante and Marx 509
Freedom Rationalized 556
Dante and the disenchanted world of Max Weber 556
From Corporeal Usury to Spiritual Usury 576
Alienation Rationalisation and Religion 576
5) Dante Dialogues - Walking and Talking with Dante – Conversations on the ‘Unending Path’ 227 pages 75,000 words
The centennial of Dante’s death approaches in 2021. 2
Exile and homecoming - Quest for Meaning, Calling back the Soul 4
Quest for soul and meaning 7
Why Read Dante Today? 18
the human comedy – existential crisis 39
Dante’s invention 58
Responses and Reactions 67
*Dante’s Poetics of Love as an Ethics of Friendship 74
Dante’s Fortuna: An Overview of Canon Formation and National Contexts 96
Oscar Wilde in Paradise 98
Dante Between the Wars 120
Osip Mandelstam’s conversation with Dante 126
The Distinction Between Authority and Authoritarianism 157
Word Return to Music 165
The Creative Universe 178
Dante’s influence on TV – arsy versy world 191
Mikhail Bakhtin and the dialogical nature of artistic creation – language an expression of social identity 192
Dante Now 214
I need an editor who is able to read all of that and who has the ability to select the most relevant, the most readable, the most interesting passages in accordance with a clear and coherent plan. The target audience is the great public.
I can promise that it will be an education.
Rationale
Below are some thoughts on the reasoning at work orienting and shaping the materials above.
The ‘real’ addresses the problems of alienation, diremption, and division prevailing in the infernal social world. The loss or impairment of social and civic bonds is shown to dissolve community, just as subjectivism/emotivism in ethics leads to the dissolution of morality as a binding and guiding code. The result is a demoralisation and despiritualisation. Dante establishes the ideal in his formal works of political philosophy, writing on the Empire and the Church to establish the proper relation between them. His concern here is to establish the proper functioning of the institutional order. Given that many may struggle to identify with these medieval institutions here, I emphasise Dante’s core concern with establishing contract and communion, community and covenant, the loving authority of the Empire establishing a protective framework of justice within which civic community and proximal relations may flourish at the interpersonal level.
In this work I accent the social, political, and ethical themes in Dante’s work but emphasize reconnection as the incarnation of transcendent standards and the rediscovery of the sacred and the spiritual. We live in a demoralised and despiritualised age. We have lost the sacred commons. We are living in a moral and most of all spiritual wilderness.
Dante’s Politics of Love therefore emphasises Dante’s combination of a just and loving imperial authority and a free and flourishing civic community, recovering human connection from under the shadow of division and diremption.
With respect to ‘rational freedom,’ I establish Dante’s connection to the radical ‘ought to be’ of transcendent standards as against the ‘is’ of a time and place that falls short of those standards. In working in the gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought,’ Dante is a radical and critical voice. No one wrote better, more beautifully, and more persuasively on the connection between reason and freedom than Dante. He insists that the more human beings are guided by reason, the more they are free. He emphasised the education of desire, the soundness of intellect, and the power of discernment. The discipline of the mountain is about the cultivation of those qualities, enabling human beings to assume responsibility for their actions. In restoring the moral and social habitus between individual and state/empire, Dante emphasises the cultivation of the virtues and the education of desire so as to underscore the locus of responsibility in the individual.
Dante argued for the need to consider temporal affairs under the aspect of eternity, urging human beings to bring their practical lives into conformity with transcendent standards and so deliver peace, freedom, and happiness. In The Empyrean, Dante looks down on the little ‘threshing floor’ of Earth, but does so not to devalue temporal affairs, only the violence and possessiveness of human beings in relation to one another in their brief moments in time. That time, he held, could be used better, more enduring, ends. Dante continually looks back down to Earth and seeks its reordering in accordance with transcendent principles. Dante goes to Heaven precisely because temporal affairs matter so much to him. He regrets the worthless passions and politics which absorb so much of the time and energies of human beings, but doesn’t dismiss those passions and politics, only seeks their proper spending. His mission is to return to Earth at journey’s end and deliver a lesson on what it takes to live life under the aspect of eternity.
Whilst Dante affirms transcendent standards of truth and justice, he insists on their incarnation and unfolding, as a matter of experiment and experience, in the concrete particulars and individual choices of time and place. I therefore emphasise Dante’s existentialism in the emphasis he places on personal moral effort, the radical uniqueness of deliberation and choice, and the irreducibility of human experience. Here, I develop Dante’s concept of ‘esperienza’ as a combination of hope and experience.
Dante and Rational Freedom.
At the same time, truth and justice are more than the subjective choices of individuals, hence the emphasis on Dante’s ‘Rational Freedom’ as resting on transcendent standards of truth and justice. Dante develops a view of ‘free necessity,’ of freedom as the appreciation of necessity, thus reconciling the two great wings of western philosophy - objectivity (knowledge of the external world, reason-nature) and subjectivity (will, artifice, reason-culture).
Within that commitment to rational freedom, the argument of the book develops a theme of alienation and rationalisation, Dante’s journey taking us from the frozen forms of the Inferno to Paradise via the recovery of the conditions of freedom/happiness in the fullness of communion and connection.
There is a strong theme of diabolic inversion and perversion in Dante. For Dante, Hell is the inversion of the true order of things, the anti-society that results when ‘men as gods’ follow the lead of rebel angels and seek to live by their own powers and choices. It is noteworthy that the inhabitants of Hell are discrete individuals separated from one another, involved only in antagonistic relation – each their own god. Dante leads us from the anti-music of the anti-city and anti-society to the true music, city, and society.
The argument therefore develops diabolic inversion and perversion as an alienation which is located in human self-estrangement from God and, from there, from the world, from others, and, ultimately, from their true selves. Hence his attempt to actualize rational freedom goes awry, making the mistake of abolishing transcendent standards in the act of bringing them down to Earth.
The problem is that a self-legislating reason is, ultimately, self-contradicting, in being unable to establish and validate its own standards. Dante’s ‘Rational Freedom’ is therefore bounded by the endless Love, as against the irrational freedom of prideful self-assertion and wilful individual choice. Dante’s love, trust, and community grounds hope in communion and covenant within the protective framework of justice. Within this framework is a moral infrastructure of civic community, proximal relations, and virtuous action in communities of character and practice. This is the institutional and ethical form and content of rational freedom. Dante’s quest for community is a quest for liberty at the same time, each being dependent on the other. In his letter to Can Grande, Dante describes the anagogical or spiritual meaning of The Comedy as ‘the exodus of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory.’ In The Comedy, Dante leads the individual from enslavement to the empirical necessity of ‘things’ to liberty. When Dante’s right to enter Purgatory is challenged by Cato, Virgil says this in Dante’s defence: ‘he goes in search of liberty—so precious, as he who gives his life for it must know.’ (libertà va cercando Purg 1: 71-72). In bidding farewell, Virgil tells Dante of all that he has attained in his journey thus far: ‘your will is free, erect, and whole—to act against that will would be to err’ (Purg 27: 127-142). In his thanks to Beatrice in Paradise, Dante underscores liberty: ‘You led me out from slavery to freedom’ (Tu m’hai di servo tratto a libertate, Purg 31: 85).
Freedom, then, is Dante’s prime value and aim, and his journey concerns the gradual attainment of liberty on the part of the pilgrim soul. That begs the question as to the nature of the freedom which Dante valued so highly. To those who ask whether this freedom was political or spiritual, the answer is: both.
Dante is concerned with freedom, its loss, and the moral, social, and institutional conditions of its recovery. The theme of estrangement and alienation leading to the ‘eternal prison’ establishes the problematic; the way out of that prison provides the solution, putting individual and social transformation together. Dante develops this theme in terms of an Aristotelian and Thomist intertwining of politics and ethics, drawing souls to the transcendent rather than seeing it simply as the progressive realisation of the immanent.
Dante’s Politics of Love
Dante’s Politics of Love is a politics of reconnection, friendship, fellowship, hope, justice, and commonality. It is a politics that seeks to overcome alienating dualisms and separations under the aspect of eternity, a reconciliation of the realms of fact and value, science and ethics, by way of the personal God, overcoming the impersonalism and indifference of a naturalist ethic concerned only with the physical universe.
Dante’s Politics of Love is therefore a politics of hope that proceeds by way of positive example and resolution of conflict.
The fundamental problem is one of division and conflict, the separation of individuals from others, from God/Nature, and in the end from themselves. That’s the problem of a world in which each chooses truth and goodness as they see fit; they end up by being neither true nor good to themselves, let alone others. They are cut off from the sources which expand being outwards and become curved in on themselves. Dante makes it clear that the task before us is one of reconnection. The central theme is therefore the loss and recovery of the social, the political, the moral, and the communal, showing how Dante put personal and communal effort and responsibility together to achieve a social and moral reconnection. Dante’s journey to the spiritual life proceeds within a socio-political framework that establishes the problematic in terms of the loss of morality, community and reconnection. The book establishes this framework and applies it to the material.
Why Read Dante Today?
The book establishes Dante’s relevance by weaving contemporary themes into the narrative, freeing Dante’s dialectic of hope from its fourteenth century determinations to reveal a story of individual commitment and participation to restoring the quality of human relations. In ‘Walking and Talking with Dante,’ I examine the response to Dante over the ages to the present age. Beyond the public realm, many, facing an exile of their own, have found their own personal Dante, whether fleeing or resisting persecution and oppression or suffering a fall from public grace. Charting Dante’s ‘afterlife,’ the book identifies contemporary themes as perennial themes of living and shows how Dante tackles them as a matter of personal and social effort.
Loss and Recovery
The book therefore opens with the modern Inferno – the alienation, petrification, disenchantment, and demoralisation analysed by Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Durkheim, Tonnies, Simmel and others. The concern here is to identify the problematic and establish the relevance of Dante in its diagnosis and resolution. The intention is to set practical reason (rhetoric and poetics as modes of persuasion and the practice of moral agency in The Comedy) in the context of an authoritative overarching moral standard (the transcendent standards of rational freedom established in the theoretical works, the Convivio and the Monarchia). Dante establishes a social ethics and communitarian politics theoretically and develops it practically, mediating between ideal and real by way of a poetics that is both moral and political. The set-pieces and exchanges of The Comedy thus emerge as a dialogue/dialectic in which pilgrim-citizens restore peace, justice, and social unity and attain Paradise as the truly human society.
The schema looks like this:
Theory/ideal (Convivio, Monarchia), mode of persuasion/rhetoric (De Vulgari/language/poetry), practice (The Comedy – practical experience, lived choices).
Rather than heavy moralising and theorising, the attempt has been made to introduce the problematic in ways that will resonate, showing how Dante unfolded it in his poetics and politics. Dante does not proceed by abstract definition, but existential engagement, delivering a lived and embodied morality. Within this existential ethic, it is the individual as pilgrim-citizen on a journey who apprehends and appreciates transcendent standards and makes a moral decision by way of will and intention. For all of the insistence on transcendent standards of truth and justice, it is the existential quality that brings principle to life. Dante’s works are still read because his words and arguments lend themselves to new readings. Far from being dead and frozen, Dante’s ideals possess a renewable quality, since the ‘Eternal justice’ exists as a ‘living justice’ (Par 19: 59-69). No matter how many time one reads The Comedy, it always suggests and teaches something new whenever you read it again. The ethic of the book is alive and in motion, even if its end is silence and rest.
The Restoration of Social Connection
With respect to the restoration of social connection, the argument emphasises the importance of trust in the relations between individuals. The case for rational freedom is stated against individualist conceptions of a libertarian freedom. At the same time, the argument shows how rational freedom undermines itself unless it adheres to transcendent standards. Without those standards, the liberatory principle of self-legislating reason itself becomes the subjectivism is seeks to counter.
The book argues strongly for communitarianism, identifying the building blocks of the solidaristic society in ties of kinship, friendship, and neighbourliness, underlining small scale practical reasoning within proximal relations and expanding solidarity and loyalty outwards from there, meeting with the unity and universality of transcendent justice coming in the other direction. There is, in other words, no opposition between the above and the below but an interpenetration and ongoing dialectic between the two in a personal and public life. If the ‘global’ institutional realm can become abstract and overbearing, then the local realm itself can also become insular and parochial – both sides can become repressive unless leavened by the qualities of the other.
From real to ideal – transcendent standards
The argument charts the transition from the anti-society to the truly human society via a process of social restoration and re-connection. Existing infernal society is scrutinized in light of ideal standards – under the aspect of eternity and ‘eternal justice.’ These transcendent standards are read in opposition to the prevailing conventionalism and constructivism of the modern world. The argument makes it clear that Dante’s metaphysical assumptions and theological commitments are not as alien to the modern world as they may seem at first glance and that there has been a strong transcendent strain in modern philosophy, however much it has been eclipsed by materialism. That strain is apparent in Leibniz, Descartes, Malabranche, Spinoza, Pascal, the Cambridge Platonists, Fenelon, Rousseau, Kant, and many others. Their critical comments on Hobbesian conventionalism and the Lockean tabula rasa offers a way back to Dante’s defence of God, free will, and the immateriality and immortality of the soul.
The Musical Model
The book contains a substantial chapter on the metaphysics of music, emphasising the harmony that results by way of the concordance of different elements in tune with Ultimate Reality. The book traces Dante’s many musical references, indicating a journey from the anti-music of Hell to the sweet harmony of Paradise. There is extensive commentary on music and numbers, presenting the transcendent standards of truth and justice underlying the apparently chaotic and disordered world. This transcendent realm is the eternity under whose aspect temporal affairs are to be seen and ordered.
The chapter on music examines the virtues of numbers and the metaphysics of music, and examines the central themes of disenchantment – the untuning of the skies, the disgodding of the Earth, the inversion of subject and object, the mechanisation of life, the materialisation of purpose and the despiritualisation of the world – in light of Dante’s Christian music of the spheres. This music retunes existence beyond a disenchanting science, returning connection with the personal God, the God of Love, relationships, and redemption. That God has been lost as a result of the scientistic focus on the physical Creation. Dante’s understanding establishes the music of the spheres as a co-partnership, seeing human beings as God’s partners in the endlessly creative universe. This sense of partnership has been lost with the abandonment of a personal God in favour of the explanation of the physical universe. The destruction of truth follows the estrangement from Love. The post-truth society is the product of a disenchanted world in which the more we come to know, the less we understand.
The book recovers the God of Love and personal relations in the chapter on Music and Numbers and then unfolds the divine throughout Dante’s journey.
The book thus covers numbers and music as the basis of true order, and proceeds to examine the displacement of God into the self-made social Hell of ‘men as gods’ and their mechanisation and industrialisation of the world, seeking to restore partnership with God in the endlessly creative universe.
The Ecology of the Heart
Dante takes us to the core of the Ecology of the Human Heart, writing on the noble heart, which is full of justice, and insisting on holding justice in the heart. Dante establishes the human role in the ecology of the heart. Dante’s music is agency – the appreciation of natural order, the active mediation that brings transcendent principle to life. The argument integrates music and politics via the musical model. Beauty is the last of the three transcendentals that people worship and respond to, and may therefore serve to turn people on to the other two, truth and goodness. Hence Beauty is the supreme political category, lighting the path to truth and goodness and inviting the heart to follow. Dante praises the noble heart and emphasises the need to hold justice in the heart. Dante seeks to lead us to the right path, but not in any narrow sense.
It is useless to waste your life on one path, especially if that path has no heart. Before you embark on a path, you ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. A path without heart is never enjoyable.
You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.
Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan
Dante’s path has heart, enlarges the heart, and encourage us forwards to take our places within the community of hearts. Dante greatly admired Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone, Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore (Love always seeks the noble heart), and cited it in the De Vulgari Eloquentia (II.v.4). He went on to compose a sonnet which was directly inspired by this dictum of the authority on love, Amor e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa (Love and the noble heart are one and the same, Vita Nuova XX.3).
The book thus emphasises the moral and social psychology of Dante in order to recover a politics of hope. In uniting the two concepts of God – the God of physical Creation and the personal God of love and relationships - Dante puts the realms of fact and value back together to overcome the great split in human understanding:
"Science and religion share the conviction that the world is intelligible, susceptible to be logically understood, but they delineate this under different paradigms. In the cleanest cases we can say that science operates with the presumption that there are causes to things, religion with the presumption that there are meanings to things. Meanings and causes have in common a concept of order, but the type of order differs."
Rolston 1987: 22
In putting the two concepts of God together, Dante puts causes and meanings together. That failure to put facts and values together, the two realms of existence, the physical and the moral, vitiates many radical philosophies:
Dante’s Sacred Ecology
There is an enormous myth being told about the modern world and the crisis it is in. The myth is that human beings have detached themselves from nature and naturalism. The truth is that materialism triumphed over idealism, contingency over transcendence, naturalism over morality, determinism over free will.
The switch from personal redemption to scientific explanation results in the disgodding of the Earth and the untuning of the skies, bringing about alienation and rationalisation within a purposeless materialism. Modernity thus emerges as an infernal condition of isolation and separation. In the book Marx’s Inferno, William Clare Roberts examined Marx's Capital as a secularisation of themes drawn from Dante. This book reverses this concern and locates Marx’s alienation in the original self-estrangement from God. Modernity’s endless fruitless searches for a non-reactionary and non-repressive answer to disenchantment is to be located in Dante.
Poetry, language, and rhetoric – modes of persuasion
The book emphasises the way that Dante incites interest through marvel and wonder. In between the ideal and the real, Dante offers not merely the practical reason of ethics and politics but also rhetoric, language, and poetry as modes of persuasion. He identifies the curial role of poets, becoming the unofficial leaders of society when the official leaders and their institutions are failing. Poetry thus becomes the mediating term between ideal and real. Dante’s image offers echoes of the allegory of Tre donne in contrasting those who have ‘giustizia in cuore’ (‘justice in their hearts’ I.130) with the Florentines who only have justice ‘on the tip of their tongues’ (I.132).
Bridging theoretical and practical reason
Dante is therefore concerned to bring abstract concepts and principles to life through existential choice and practice. He thus bridges the gap between theoretical reason – our knowledge of the external world, the realm of fact – and practical reason – ethics and politics, the realm of value, what we do with knowledge. In this, he also reconciles the two great wings of western philosophy - objectivity (reason-nature, the scientific examination of external reality) and subjectivity (reason-culture, will, and artifice).
In this, Dante offers his own variant of ‘freedom as the appreciation of necessity.’ The key term in this phrase is ‘appreciation,’ identifying human beings as conscious moral agents who attain freedom through their understanding. The problem is that many people conceive this ‘necessity’ in different ways, and the ontological status of the things they rest this claim to necessity on is invariably uncertain. I argue for transcendent standards of truth and justice, others are happy to stick to logic and facts and argue that knowledge can stretch no further than these. Every time we search for the commons and the common ground, we run to what Nancy calls ‘groundless grounds.’ Whilst this view is untenable, so too are false projections of certainty in an uncertain world. The ontological status of all things is uncertain, hence endless philosophical controversialising. The temper of politics is judicious. Truth cannot decide political matters, even if we could ever decide and agree upon the nature and content of that truth. Life is a judgment call. So, too, is God. That is why we have faith. There is a leap to be made, and we may leap in the wrong direction. The more fact and logic we have on our side, the less of a leap we will have to make. But leap we must, and the accumulation of fact and perfection of logic doesn’t alter the need for that motivation to leap in the first place. God is not certainty and is without proof. But the same can be said of life in the ceaselessly creative universe. That universe is God’s infinite love, what Dante calls ‘la infinita via.’ We live into mystery. I therefore emphasise Dante’s heartleap.
The structure of disconnection and reconnection
The ‘death of God’ seals the fate of human bonds, social connections, and community. Social and spiritual desolidarisation produces the hell of an atomised world of autonomous ‘I’s’ as new gods. The need to recover ‘we.’ The supplanting of God by ‘men as gods’ is connected to the rise of libertarianism, an assertion of the autonomy of the individual. Human beings have thought they could go it alone and conquer the world by reason and technology, in the process finding themselves the masters of nowhere. ‘Where there is nothing,’ wrote Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation, ‘both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.’ In restoring ‘something’ in the form of the Greatest Love of all, Dante envisages a world in which ‘I and mine’ are supplanted by ‘we and ours’ (Par 19: 7-12), community as a constellation of souls. Dante does not reject individual liberty. On the contrary, he values free will as God’s greatest gift to human beings and emphasises its use by individuals. Reason, speech, intellect, and will are the things which emphasise the human likeness to God. This is human beings living up to their God-given powers, not supplanting God and become individual gods in themselves by way of the discrete ‘I’ separated from all other ‘I’s’ as well as from God. Dante’s case for individual liberty is thus made in partnership with God, in fulfilment of God’s intentions. The deicide of a libertarian ‘men as gods’ is the very antithesis of this, issuing not in freedom but in unfreedom, an enslavement to the immediacy of desire.
It follows that the quest for individuality is also the quest for community. Inferno is the anti-social Hell of individual isolation and mutual antagonism; Purgatory is the community of reconnection – of character-construction, change, and conversion; Paradise is the harmonious society of mutual growth and joy. Dante emphasises that the moral and social bonds that have been lost can be recovered and that there is an enduring quality and underlying orderly foundation to the disorder. That foundation, as the inscription over Hell’s gate makes clear, is the Supreme Justice, Divine Power, and Primal Love. The world is never in a hopeless condition beyond redemption; a civic and social restoration is always possible.
The empire and universal authority
There is a need to insist on a definition of true authority, in face of the rise of classless/non-political despots/techno-bureaucrats claiming to be neutral and independent, a modern version of benevolent dictators who are beyond politics. Such philosopher-kings are being touted as the ideal model for leadership in these divided times. That figure is a chimera and an illusion, and, far from being benign and benevolent, pose dangers to politics and freedom. Dante argued for the importance of philosophy with respect to rulers and the cause of good governance, but also sought to make the ‘bread of angels’ available to everyone, raising a democratic public of philosopher-citizens. If individuals don’t always know their own good, Dante insisted that they were capable of coming to know it. The entire journey of The Comedy is all about that coming to self-knowledge. The intervention of dictators claiming to know the good here circumvents the entire process to render individuals the passive objects of purposes that are external to them. Dante’s imperial justice steers well clear of an authoritarian politics, insisting that the protective framework of the imperial contract is precisely to establish the conditions in which individual liberty, free will, and personal responsibility can flourish in community with others.
Politics and Ethics
For Dante, libertarian and authoritarian concepts are two sides of the same abstraction of the individual and of society. This book thus criticises the Hobbesian view of the state of nature as the war of all against all. Hobbes argues for contingency and convention against transcendence, holding that a natural mutual antagonism forces recourse to a collective and coercive state authority to impose the civil peace. As against this necessity of the coercive state in a fallen condition, Dante advances the Aristotelian notion of political community as an expression of the naturally associative tendencies of human beings. This part of the book establishes the connection between the covenant and communion established by the Church and the spiritual ideal on the one hand and the social contract established and upheld by the Empire on the other. In this vision, the Empire serves as a protective framework ensuring the civic peace required for the flourishing of the lesser communities it encompasses. Freedom and happiness are achieved within the civic community. The Empire is the supreme political community which embodies and administers justice, serving as the ethical agency of the universal interest or common good. In being the central authority concerned to enforce justice, the Empire has a protective function with respect to individual rights and liberties. In this sense, it serves as the social contract between individuals, an agreement based upon consent and which proceeds in accordance with law. In administering justice, the Emperor is impartial and without interest. To this extent, the Empire is little different to the modern liberal state, which purports to be neutral on the good – with the great exception that the Empire is explicit embodying a substantive conception of the good, whereas the liberal state is surreptitious in hiding behind the claim to neutrality. Hobbes’ view is comparable to the view of Brunetto Latini and others in Dante’s day, who argued the need for political restraint on account of the savagery of natural man. Against this view, Dante affirmed the naturally associative tendencies of human beings as leading to the formation of the state.
In fine, Dante’s rational freedom exists as a combination of autonomy, authority, and authenticity, identifying rational-imperial law and order as loving and liberating.
Politics and civics
The political message of the Paradise is ‘Love Justice All You Who Rule the World.’ The word ‘justice’ appears 71 times in The Comedy. The emphasis on the city and the civic community is a way of bringing Dante’s case for church and empire – communion/covenant and contract/commonality - down to a human scale and building from there. In emphasising the civic and associational dimension of Dante’s politics, the book shows the way that the above and the below interpenetrate, each complementing the other in the one whole.
Whilst Dante argues for the Empire as the embodiment of justice, the city is his consistent focus of interest. Dante thus establishes the habitus for small scale practical reasoning, a citizenly experience in which individuals come to own their personal and social problems and take responsibility for them. The point is made that ambitious, large scale visions of justice and authority – which Dante certainly argues for – are viable only when rooted organically in a civic pride and patriotism, expressing the moral and civic sense of place.
The themes of ethics, politics, and justice in Dante’s works are developed with a view to the problems and conflicts of the contemporary world, arguing that his political, moral, and spiritual concerns resonate compellingly in the modern world. Chapters focus on Dante’s early poetry, his turn to philosophy in the aftermath of Beatrice’s death, and his linguistic and theoretical works, all the time highlighting the questions of ethics, agency, judgement, and politics that he would tackle in The Comedy as he journeys from Hell to Eternity.
Walking and Talking with Dante – Conversations with Dante on the ‘Unending Path’
In ‘Walking and Talking with Dante,’ I discuss the various responses to Dante over the centuries, both personal and political, bringing the book’s concern with ethics, political philosophy, and social justice into the contemporary world.
There is a need to emphasise that the truth in Dante is not contained, passively, in the cosmology and the metaphysics but in the experience, the relationships, and the concrete particulars – in the conversations that Dante has with us about lived experience and the incarnation of universal truth in concrete particulars. Dante’s large views in the abstract are manifested in large views in the concrete particulars of life. There is a dialogic and dialectical quality to Dante’s mode of presentation that makes clear the extent to which the transcendent (the immortals, the eternal feminines, ‘eternal justice,’ God) is incarnated in time and place and consciously known – appreciated - only there.
Dante’s Politics of Love
Cornel West argues that justice is the form that love takes in public. It is worth emphasising the extent to which Dante connects the search for love with the pursuit of justice. Far from locking love away in some spiritual attic, Dante brings it to the centreground of politics. Love has a direct bearing upon the central questions of politics – justice, the good society and the common good. In the context of the Thomist synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian cosmology, the coalescence of love and politics should not be so surprising. The questions of human flourishing within the public life of politics – the ultimate end for Aristotle - are resolved within the ultimate end for Aquinas – perfection through union with God. For Dante, politics is preparatory for us coming to see and know God. Dante subscribed to the Aristotelian and Thomist tradition which integrated politics within a comprehensive metaphysical framework. Within this tradition, Dante could not be indifferent to politics. One should not be surprised to read of the extent of Dante’s commitment to and participation in the politics of the Italian city states. There is nothing in Dante of the supposed Christian disdain for and rejection of politics. But Dante’s participation in politics concerns more than mere power struggles. Indeed, Dante is seeking to transcend the petty concerns of politics as practised in the city-states in favour of a larger vision of political peace and unity. In becoming a ‘party of one,’ Dante sought to lead political protagonists to conduct their political affairs with an eye on the greater truth and the greater love that enfolds, nourishes, and sustains all.
For Dante, love was also an active concept in politics. The idea of a politics of love is not as fanciful as it may sound. From Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas, friendship or amity is the firm foundation of political life of the community. Plato had defined justice as the social virtue par excellence; Aristotle had defined the human being as a zoon politikon, a social animal. 'All things in common among friends' the saying goes, and it is the personal virtue of individuals that ensure their common use.’ (Aristotle Politics 1981: 115). Aristotle is the most realistic of philosophers, but he expatiates at length on love and friendship as the common ground of politics. Aristotle distinguishes philoi as ‘friends’ and philia, philein etc. as 'affection', 'fond' etc. from philauton as 'selfishness', 'lover of self. The ancient conception defines humanity as a social and cooperative species, possessed of both philia (friendship) and dike (justice).
St. Thomas Aquinas combines will, love, justice and mercy within the ultimate end for human beings in relation to God. Thomas makes love and the passions the very naturalistic basis of morality and politics. Dante stands in line with this tradition. Human beings as social beings need others in order to be themselves. The common good and the common life is at the heart of any politics so defined. Politics is a matter of love. The key question of politics is how disparate men and women might, as social individuals, join together in their various orders and degrees, in order to best live and flourish well. Does the binding element come from within, via love, or does it have to be imposed from without, via law? Dante argues for law and guidance; he is also clear that the more that law is socialised and internalised, the more it takes the form of a self-regulating love that proceeds in accordance with an innate understanding of justice. We can thus envisage the flourishing of a society of volunteers, pilgrim-citizens, within the protective framework and loving authority of the state.
Human Beings as truth-seekers
Dante defines human beings as truth- and meaning-seeking pilgrim-citizens. There is a need to emphasise the value of truth seeking over notions of truth and its possession. I therefore make a distinction between knowledge and certainty to criticise metaphysical and scientific descriptions as attempts to capture that which cannot be captured. The ontological status of all things is uncertain. Transcendent standards are indeterminate and cannot be presented in determinate form as an unarguable and unquestionable necessity. The truth of the statement ‘freedom is the appreciation of necessity’ lies in the quality of the appreciation. We can honour the search for meaning – the vision of human beings as truth seekers – whilst criticising the imposition of meaning as a misplaced certainty, projecting ‘truth’ as frozen and petrified, and perverting the living force of love. This point applies not merely to Dante’s picture of the universe, but to all such pictures as rationalisations. In bare abstract outline, the vision is implausible. It only becomes plausible in being lived as an experiential journey. People will flock to Dante’s ‘true city,’ to enjoy life, love, and light, and revel in the beauty of the moment for all eternity.