Dante’s intellectual development and public career

A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined and noble sense of life.

It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart, and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady, especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the Purgatorio (XXIV).

This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style, associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.

Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the Blacks.

There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.

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By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.

Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered. Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.

In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence. That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January 1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to death.

Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true “divine comedy.”

Exile, Il convivio, and De monarchia

Information about Dante’s early years in exile is scanty; nevertheless, enough is known to provide a broad picture. It seems that Dante at first was active among the exiled White Guelfs in their attempts to seek a military return. These efforts proved fruitless. Evidently Dante grew disillusioned with the other Florentine outcasts, the Ghibellines, and was determined to prove his worthiness by means of his writings and thus secure his return. These are the circumstances that led him to compose Il convivio (c. 1304–07; The Banquet).

Dante projected a work of 15 books, 14 of which would be commentaries on different canzoni. He completed only four of the books. The finished commentaries in many ways go beyond the scope of the poems, becoming a compendium of instruction (though they also show his lack of formal training in philosophy). Dante’s intention in the Convivio, as in The Divine Comedy, was to place the challenging moral and political issues of his day into a suitable ethical and metaphysical framework.

Book I of the Convivio is in large part a stirring and systematic defense of the vernacular. (The unfinished De vulgari eloquentia [c. 1304–07; Concerning Vernacular Eloquence], a companion piece, presumably written in coordination with Book I, is primarily a practical treatise in the art of poetry based upon an elevated poetic language.) Dante became the great advocate of its use, and in the final sentence of Book I he accurately predicts its glorious future:

This shall be the new light, the new sun, which shall rise when the worn-out one shall set, and shall give light to them who are in shadow and in darkness because of the old sun, which does not enlighten them.

The revolution Dante described was nothing less than the twilight of the predominantly clerical Latin culture and the emergence of a lay, vernacular urban literacy. Dante saw himself as the philosopher-mediator between the two, helping to educate a newly enfranchised public readership. The Italian literature that Dante heralded was soon to become the leading literature and Italian the leading literary language of Europe, and they would continue to be that for more than three centuries.

In the Convivio Dante’s mature political and philosophical system is nearly complete. In this work Dante makes his first stirring defense of the imperial tradition and, more specifically, of the Roman Empire. He introduces the crucial concept of horme—that is, of an innate desire that prompts the soul to return to God. But it requires proper education through examples and doctrine. Otherwise it can become misdirected toward worldly aims and society torn apart by its destructive power. In the Convivio Dante establishes the link between his political thought and his understanding of human appetite: given the pope’s craving for worldly power, at the time there existed no proper spiritual models to direct the appetite toward God; and given the weakness of the empire, there existed no law sufficient to exercise a physical restraint on the will. For Dante this explains the chaos into which Italy had been plunged, and it moved him, in hopes of remedying these conditions, to take up the epic task of The Divine Comedy.

But a political event occurred that at first raised tremendous hope but then plunged Dante into still greater disillusionment. In November 1308 Henry, the count of Luxembourg, was elected king of Germany, and in July 1309 the French pope, Clement V, who had succeeded Boniface, declared Henry to be king of the Romans and invited him to Rome, where in time he would be crowned Holy Roman emperor in St. Peter’s Basilica. The possibility of once again having an emperor electrified Italy; and among the imperial proponents was Dante, who saw approaching the realization of an ideal that he had long held: the coming of an emperor pledged to restore peace while also declaring his spiritual subordination to religious authority. Within a short time after his arrival in Italy in 1310 Henry VII’s great appeal began to fade. He lingered too long in the north, allowing his enemies to gather strength. Foremost among the opposition to this divinely ordained moment, as Dante regarded it, was the commune of Florence.

During these years Dante wrote important political epistles—evidence of the great esteem in which he was held throughout Italy, of his personal authority, as it were—in which he exalted Henry, urging him to be diligent, and condemned Florence. In subsequent action, however, which was to remind Dante of Boniface’s duplicity, Clement himself turned against Henry. This action prompted one of Dante’s greatest polemical treatises, his De monarchia (c. 1313; On Monarchy), in which he expands the political arguments of the Convivio. In the embittered atmosphere caused by Clement’s deceit, Dante turned his argumentative powers against papal insistence on its superiority over the political ruler—that is, against the argument that the empire derived its political authority from the pope. In the final passages of the Monarchia, Dante writes that the ends designed by Providence for humanity are twofold: one end is the bliss of this life, which is conveyed in the figure of the earthly paradise, and the other is the bliss of eternal life, which is embodied in the image of a heavenly paradise.

Yet despite their different ends, these two purposes are not unconnected. Dante concludes his Monarchia by assuring his reader that he does not mean to imply “that the Roman government is in no way subject to the Roman pontificate, for in some ways our mortal happiness is ordered for the sake of immortal happiness.” Dante’s problem was that he had to express in theoretical language a subtle relationship that might be better conveyed by metaphoric language and historical example. Surveying the history of the relationship between papacy and empire, Dante pointed with approval to specific historical examples, such as Constantine’s good will toward the church. Dante’s disappointment in the failed mission of Henry VII derived from the fact that Henry’s original sponsor was apparently Pope Clement and that conditions seemed to be ideal for reestablishing the right relationship between the supreme powers.