I: "LOVE, THAT MOVES THE SUN AND ALL THE OTHER STARS"
In 1274, a respectable Florentine banker took his nine-years-old son to a visit in the house of a colleague.
The banker leading his little boy down the cobbled streets of Florence was Alighiero di Bellincione and the child by his side was named Dante Alighieri.
Alighiero claimed Roman ancestry - which his son would repeat his entire life. Whether this was an idle boast or a true claim, one of his ancestors did fight as a knight in the First Crusade, thus the family was for a very long time established amongst the Milites - the Aristocrats who ruled Florence for a long time.
Their host was to be Folco di Ricovero Portinari. Not only was Portinari not of noble birth, he was not even a Florentine: He was born on the other side of the Apennines, in Portico di Romagna, near Forlì (or Furlè, as the local Romagnol would call it). He came to live in Florence after already making his fortune. He would become one of the Priors of the Arti, that is, one of the highest officers of the Florentine Republic.
On this day, young Dante would see Portinari's daughter for the first time in his life. Beatrice, or "Bice" as was her nickname, was slightly younger than himself.
From then on Amor governed my soul, which was so soon wedded to him, and began to acquire over me such certainty and command, through the power my imagination gave him, that I was forced to carry out his wishes fully.
He commanded me many times to discover whether I might catch sight of this most tender of angels, so that in my boyhood I many times went searching, and saw her to be of such noble and praiseworthy manners, that certainly might be said of her those words of the poet Homer:
‘She did not seem to be the daughter of a mortal man, but of a god’.
And though her image, that which was continually with me, was a device of Amor’s to govern me, it was nevertheless of so noble a virtue that it never allowed Amor to rule me without the loyal counsel of reason in all those things where such counsel was usefully heard.
(Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, I)
Dante would not see Beatrice for the next nine years, according to his testimony in La Vita Nuova, and when they finally met again, it was a chance encounter on the street. He had learned to cherish those encounters, but it is unclear if Beatrice was even aware of his affections - as a perfect Florentine gentleman, Dante never embarrassed her with an open declaration of his love.
Dante soon married Gemma Donati, which he was betrothed to by his father just two years after his fateful encounter with Beatrice. This political marriage (the Donati family were the traditional leaders of the Black Guelphs, it seems that the cautious Alighiero wanted to secure his intelligent and bookish son from all sides) had produced at least four children, but of their happiness we have only two indicators: Dante, who had written volumes about Beatrice, seemed to have never dipped his pen in Gemma's honor and Gemma, for her part, refused to join her husband in is 1301 exile and instead entered a convent in Ravenna, where she was still living in 1333, twelve years after her husband's death in the same city. We do not know if they ever saw each other in the three years they both lived there.
Beatrice herself would soon marry a banker by the name of Simone dei Bardi (which may or may not be the inspiration to the demon Barbariccia in Dante's Inferno a) with whom she seemed to lead a happy enough lives for three years before her death in 1290. She was 25 years old.
II: THE EMPIRE OF PEACE
In exile, Dante's views shifted from that of a White Guelph to that of an all-out Ghibelline. Between 1312-1313 he worked on his great political work De Monarchia in which he justifies the Universal Rule of the Holy Roman Emperor not as an instrument or an extension of Papal power but as a power unto itself, co-equal to the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
The logical descent of the Monarchy is this:
Man is distinguished from the animals in his power of Philosophical Speculation, which is the only way in which he may reach Righteousness and receive the love and grace of God.
Speculation requires Peace.
Peace is best achieved under the rule of a single, Universal Prince.
Therefore God established the World Empire.
This Universal Prince must have a natural nobility of character, which consist of him loving his subjects more than himself.
The Universal Prince must be aided by and originate from an Imperial People, which God had already chosen and created specifically for the purpose of Universal Sovereignty and endowed with the noble nature of the Universal Prince.
The Romans demonstrated the fitness of their nature and therefore God's purpose in their creation by their nobility of character and heroic conduct during the days of the early Roman Republic without the instruction of Christianity, showing it is natural to them.
They have won the role of the World Empire by contest of arms, which is God's way to reveal His will and justice.
Jesus confirmed their right to rule since he chose to be born under it and thus place himself under Roman Law and Jurisdiction and to die by it as the Penal Substitute to the sins of the World - if the Romans were not the rightful rulers of the world, his death by their hands would have not constituted punishment but an act of violence and therefore could not atone for the Original Sin.
Therefore any opposition to the power of the Roman Emperor constitutes a rebellion against the Rightful Universal Prince and the disturbance of God's Peace and the greatest sin possible.
De Monarchia was placed under the Papal ban in 1585. This ban was removed only in 1881, when the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved for more than seven decades and the Guelph cause for nearly three centuries.
III: THE HATEFUL CITY
Of a greater interest to us is Dante's other, more famous great work - the Divine Comedy, which Dante had started to compose in 1308, seven year in to his exile and finished in 1320, one year before his death.
Rather than the outright attempt to justify the Ghibelline / White Guelph project, the Comedy is a sharp repudiation of the Politics of Hatred reigning in his native city.
The Comedy (named so not for an attempt at hilarity but, according to the conventions of the time, to its happy culmination in Dante's coming to Heaven), opens in Dante being trapped in a dark forest by three beasts: a Leopon, symbolizing Lust, a Lion, standing for Pride and a She-Wolf, which is the symbol of Falsehood.
He is rescued from this predicament by the spirit of the Roman poet Virgil (of which he was a great admirer), who is on a Heavenly mission from the sainted soul of Beatrice to lead him through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven towards the Throne of God Himself.
The details of his journey are too great to repeat here. It is sufficient to observe various characteristics of the work:
The myriad political figures which populate the Inferno are not there by Dante's desire for petty vengeance, but as representatives of the civic sins which, in Dante's opinion, had lead the Empire in general and Italy in particular to ruin.
This reflects the motive of Hell. Hell is a "City" and it is ruled as a city-state, having citizens, officers and of course, the Prince of Hell himself. But this City is not in either sentiment or government. Good, effective government is a Divine blessings, and as such, it is completely absent in Hell. Each Level of Hell seems to be ruled independently by a local ruler and sometimes the demons and sinner seems to be lead by various independent bands without any coherence even within the same level. The entire landscape is saturated with Hatred - Hatred between the Damned and their demonic torturers, but also between the various demons and monsters of Hell.
Hell is also in a state of disrepair: bridges that have collapsed in the great earthquake that have shaken Hell during the Crucifixion still stand in ruin, forcing the travelers to change their course. It is a place were none can be persuaded to do any creative or restorative work for the benefit of the whole.
This is reflected in the ever narrowing structure of Hell which grows smaller, more oppressive and claustrophobic, the deeper One descends within it. Eventually Dante comes to the smallest and deepest chamber of Hell- the sit of Lucifer himself, which is discovered alone, with only the three traitors he gnaws in his jaws for company. He is completely helpless and impotent, being trapped in the ice from his waste down. Virgil does not even bother rebuking him to stay away from harming Dante while the pair climbes on the hind quarters of Satan himself and escape out of a crack in the wall, to find themselves at the foot of Mt. Purgatorio, effectively already on the road to Salvation.
IV: THE KINGDOM OF LOVE
Out of Hell, Dante find himself at the foot of Purgatory Mountain, which he slowly ascends together with the souls of those which were saved from Damnation by the Grace of God, but are yet to purify their souls from sin. Once they reach the Earthly Paradise at the peak, from which they ascend to Heaven.
While the souls on Purgatory Mountain do suffer for their vices, they are very much within the sphere of God's love and protection. Their suffering is indeed not punitive in nature, but restorative, since they were guilty not of actual sins but of dispositions leading to sin, which make them unfit to enter Heaven yet.
Therefore, when Dante advance the idea that the prayers of the Living may shorten the time the Dead spend in Purgatory, his point is not that merit is transferable, but that Human Love works upon its recipient just as Divine Love, in a transformative and medicinal manner, curing the Beloved from the ailment of Vice and making it more alike to the Lover.
“It is my Nella who, with her abundant tears, has guided me to drink the sweet wormwood of torments: she,
with sighs and prayers devout has set me free of that slope where one waits and has freed me from circles underneath this circle. She—
my gentle widow, whom I loved most dearly— was all the more beloved and prized by God as she is more alone in her good works."
(DANTE ALIGHIERI, PURGATORIO, CANTO XXIII:85-93)
The reason is that Purgatory and Heaven are very much a single State: the Kingdom of God's visible Love, which merely manifests itself differently upon the Saints (already in Heaven) who enjoy it directly and the Saved in Purgatory, who receive it as correction and bitter healing of the Soul. In this Kingdom, it is visible to all that all Love is a scion or a rivulet of God's Love, even that which originates in the World of Flesh, which is of the same realm of Hell - the Earthly State in which God's love is hidden.
V: POLITICAL IMPLICATION OF THE COMEDY
What is, then, the political ideal for Dante?
Here we return to two visions previously visited: that of Augustin and that of the Sienese Allegory of Good and Bad Government.
As we have observed, Lorenzetti's allegory is not concerned with Love or Hatred as the driving force in politics. The City enjoying good government does so because the Rightful Ruler possesses the Cardinal Virtues and rule by them while the city suffering under a bad government does so because the Tyrant is afflicted with all the vices and is ruled by them. While the ultimate outcome of bad government are the destruction of the State by external powers preying on its weakness borne out of the tyrant's wickedness, the business of a bad government is not to loosen of the ties of the State between the citizens and their rulers but their excessive tightening.
The question of whether the virtuous and rightful ruler loves his subjects is either immaterial or absurd. Being virtuous, he cannot fail to either love them or to confer upon them the ultimate benefit the can hope for from a loving ruler. A tyrant may or may not hate his subjects, but by his very vicious nature the result of his rule would be equal or worse to those they would suffer under an actively hostile ruler.
Augustin, on the other hand, is interested with almost exclusively in the Law of Love, which the Heavenly State obeys while the Earthly State defies. The Citizens of the Heavenly State love each other in a love descending from their Divine Master which guides them towards the well-ordering of their lives. The Earthly State is governed by the hatred and envy each citizen fills towards the other and therefore it leads to disorder and ultimately to the collapse of Man's visible empire and Mankind's ultimate enslavement, degradation and finally, the fires and chaos of Hell.
Dante therefore follows Augustin, but only so far. Unsatisfied with the pathological report of Augustin on the demise of the Roman Empire (which he denies), he see the Earthly State as the reflection of the Heavenly one and indeed, the only fortress in the Earthly Realm against the maddening Chaos of Hellish Hatred, within which the Church can operate upon the souls of the citizens to bring them closer to Heaven. Earth is thus rent, by the Monarchia, from the clutches of Hell unto the Heavenly Realm, as a place where Love can be visible work in Peace upon the souls of Mankind to make them worthy of ascending to Heaven
William Shakespeare should be seen then as Dante's latest disciple, but he modifies the Florentine's devotional teaching by changing the object of the love between citizens: God may be the originator of all Love, which renders One a good citizen and saves One from being a bad one, but the question of Heaven and Hell is pushed to the side. The good citizen may be rewarded for his patriotism in Heaven, but the English bard would not be disturbed if that was not so. His object is to define and bring people into the fulfillment of their civic duties and this can be achieved only through love of One's neighbor, which, unlike and in the absence of Dante's Universal Monarch, actually creates Peace on Earth.
It was Locke who have taken this teaching one step further: It is not the State which allows Man to love his neighbor, but Man, endowed by his creator with the capacity for Love, had banded together with his fellow man to create the State, in which all the ties and institution by which he contains his love may be protected. Thus Earth ceases to be an extension of Heaven or Hell, but become its own realm, in which men choose whether to serve their "One sovereign master" well or ill, whether to carry out His order by which all of them were sent hither, and to create this very Earth a realm of Heavenly Love and voluntary order, or to disobey it and create a small Hell upon Earth, a Hell of tyranny and chaos.