Dante's Philosophical Life: Politics and Human Wisdom in "Purgatorio"

By Paul Stern

When political theorists teach the history of political philosophy, they typically skip from the ancient Greeks and Cicero to Augustine in the fifth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, and then on to the origins of modernity with Machiavelli and beyond. Paul Stern aims to change this settled narrative and makes a powerful case for treating Dante Alighieri, arguably the greatest poet of medieval Christendom, as a political philosopher of the first rank.

In Dante's Philosophical Life, Stern argues that Purgatorio's depiction of the ascent to Earthly Paradise, that is, the summit of Mount Purgatory, was intended to give instruction on how to live the philosophic life, understood in its classical form as "love of wisdom." As an object of love, however, wisdom must be sought by the human soul, rather than possessed. But before the search can be undertaken, the soul needs to consider from where it begins: its nature and its good. In Stern's interpretation of Purgatorio, Dante's intense concern for political life follows from this need, for it is law that supplies the notions of good that shape the soul's understanding and it is law, especially its limits, that provides the most evident display of the soul's enduring hopes.

According to Stern, Dante places inquiry regarding human nature and its good at the heart of philosophic investigation, thereby rehabilitating the highest form of reasoned judgment or prudence. Philosophy thus understood is neither a body of doctrines easily situated in a Christian framework nor a set of intellectual tools best used for predetermined theological ends, but a way of life. Stern's claim that Dante was arguing for prudence against dogmatisms of every kind addresses a question of contemporary concern: whether reason can guide a life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780812295016

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Politics, Poetry,

and Philosophy in Purgatorio

I came to Dante’s Commedia already well into my career.¹ Preparing to teach it in a first-year course, I, like many readers, was captivated by the poem’s sheer imaginative power. As a student of classical political philosophy, I was also impressed—and puzzled—by how frequently Dante uses this power for a political end. In particular, I wondered why politics should have such prominence in a poem about the Christian afterlife, especially a conception of it that chimes so clearly and insistently with a classical understanding. This wonder motivates my study. Its primary aim is not to explicate Dante’s political views, a task ably accomplished by others.² Rather, it seeks to account for the philosophic importance of politics in the poem, to explain why in an intellectual milieu shaped by Christianity and Neoplatonism, a religion and a philosophic school united in their diminishment of politics, the political realm should occupy such a significant place in the Commedia’s vision. My thesis is that the poem’s political surface provides the key to its depths. More specifically, I argue that the prominence and meaning Dante accords politics are crucial to the vindication of rational inquiry into the human good, which, I also argue, is his poem’s intent.

American Dante scholarship of the past fifty years maintains a different view. With a few notable exceptions, this scholarship understands the poem’s intent as religious.³ Charles Singleton supplies this reading’s principle: Dante sees as poet and realizes as poet what is already conceptually elaborated and established in Christian doctrine.⁴ For Singleton, the poem’s purpose as versified Christian doctrine is plain.

Yet, precisely the Christian character that makes Singleton’s characterization credible renders anomalous the meaning and prominence the poem gives to politics. The Commedia repeatedly highlights a political life significantly more robust than Christian doctrine is at all likely to endorse. A few examples suffice to make the point: though one searches the New Testament in vain for a legal code, in Purgatorio Dante maintains that positive law, informed by but not deduced from a higher order, is essential to a well-lived life; furthermore, though Augustine insists on the gulf between Rome’s pride-driven greatness and the genuine virtue of humility, it is prideful virtue, exemplified by Cato and celebrated by Virgil, that wins Dante’s praise; finally, despite Aquinas’s significant alteration of the place of politics in the Christian world, Purgatorio reveals an unbridgeable divide between his view and Dante’s regarding the notion of natural law (XVI. 94–96; I. 48, 66; VI. 118–20).⁵

Singleton’s position could be vindicated were the status and meaning politics has in Purgatorio altered in Paradiso. But Dante’s distinctive political concerns intrude even in heaven, disturbing its serenity in some particularly prominent locations (e.g., Par. VI. 1–142, X. 109–14, XIII. 46–49, 88–96, XVI. 34–154, XVII. 13–142, XXX. 127–48).⁶ There, too, Dante cares deeply about politics, and his preferred brand still takes its bearings from models that clash with Christian doctrine. The question of the relationship between his religious vision and his political concerns persists beyond the poem’s conclusion.

The difficulty has not gone unnoticed. Objections to the view Singleton summarizes, although never in the majority, are not all of recent vintage.⁷ In fact, doubts about Dante’s orthodoxy arose contemporaneously with the poem’s publication. While for some the Commedia quickly earned the status of sacred scripture, others were skeptical.⁸ As Anthony Cassell remarks, Dante’s son Pietro felt perpetual dread that "his father’s Commedia could be found heterodox."⁹ He adds that Pietro produced his commentaries on the Commedia to explain away its controversial views.¹⁰ And, in 1335, the Roman province of the Dominicans forbade study of the poem. Their fear is not unfounded. One of its sources is the friction between Dante’s treatment of politics, on the one hand, and established Christian doctrine, on the other, especially given the work’s specific poetic form.

As Dante’s treatment of his poetic predecessors in Purgatorio indicates, poetry, notwithstanding critiques such as Aquinas’s, did have a place in Dante’s world.¹¹ Thus, when Boccaccio praises Dante as the first to open the way for the return to Italy of the banished Muses, he cannot be referring to poetry as such.¹² Rather, Boccaccio’s statement echoes what Virgil, Dante’s initial guide, writes of his own political poetry: I first, if life but remain, will return to my country, bringing the Muses with me in triumph from the Aeonian peak.¹³ In the poem that Virgil brings to his native land he addresses Roman affairs, as does Dante in his.¹⁴ Both repatriate epic poetry with its nation-founding sagas of the hero who epitomizes the community’s way of life—one of several precious objects Dante appropriates from the classical treasury (IX. 136–38).¹⁵

But Calliope, the banished Muse of epic poetry, was particularly unwelcome in Dante’s pervasively Christian world (I. 8–10). As Robert Hollander writes, It is the sin of the poet, in Augustinian-Aquinian eyes, to claim for secular literature a license for a higher form of truth-telling that is explicitly reserved to the Bible and to the writings of its anointed interpreters.¹⁶ The persistent worry is that a poet might not only regard himself but, through poetry’s persuasive power, come to be regarded by others as a prophet (XXIX. 104–5).¹⁷ Yet what need is there for the prophet’s new revelation and correspondingly new way of life when the true, universal, and permanent teaching has already been promulgated? A claim such as Dante’s, to express a true vision of the next world, could only be, in the words of a church authority, ‘vainglorious heresy.’ ¹⁸ Nevertheless, Dante’s epic provides just such a justificatory vision, and Dante insists throughout on its veracity.

As evident in his poem’s novel hero, Dante adopts the epic form to new circumstances. Still, the present point is that, like Homer, the sovereign poet, to whom the Muses gave more milk than ever to any other, and like Virgil, Dante’s sweetest father, he too undertakes to shape a people’s way of life (Inf. IV. 88; XXII. 101–2, XXX. 50). Dante’s poem, as do theirs, conveys a notion of good that informs the entire community, intertwining ethics and politics in a shared view of a choiceworthy life. In the epic manner, the Commedia makes this view compelling through vivid portrayals of the hero who founds the community and of the divinity that substantiates its goodness. Plato’s Socrates vouches for this link between epic poetry and great politics when, to found Kallipolis, he reconceives Homer’s gods and heroes, engaging in what he calls theology.¹⁹

Dante’s definition of poetry—verbal invention composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music—indicates why poetry is such an effective tool with which to undertake a "reformation for the whole of humanity on earth," as John Scott characterizes Dante’s political project (DVE II. iv. 2–3).²⁰ Like rhetoric, poetry aims to persuade, even if to achieve that goal it needs to speak a truth that has the face of a lie (Inf. XVI. 124). Like music, poetry exerts its persuasive power through an appeal to the passions as it attracts to itself the human spirits (Conv. II. xiii. 23).²¹ As the multitude of Dante’s contemporary readers attests, his epic poetry retains its compelling power.

In choosing to write an epic, and in taking Virgil as his initial guide, Dante signals his seriousness about effecting a far-reaching political change. Every proposal for such change presupposes a critique of the existing order, the more far-reaching the proposed change, the more fundamental the critique. Underlying all such critiques is a vision of how we ought to live together, some standard of justice that is not being met. Furthermore, every standard of justice appeals to a conception of a well-lived life.²² To answer the question about the elevation of politics by Dante requires therefore that we grasp his notion of such a life.

In this regard, it is useful to note that Augustine, for one, would find Dante’s aim misguided and, most pertinent to the present purpose, Dante’s seriousness misplaced. The divergence between Augustine and Dante about politics reflects, however, a still deeper divide, a difference that concerns, ultimately, the meaning of philosophy. To be more specific, it is Dante’s understanding of philosophy, decisively distinct from Augustine’s, that expresses Dante’s view of the best life and, accordingly, provides the ultimate rationale for Dante’s political concern—or so I shall argue.

For Augustine, philosophy is properly identified with metaphysics, a view that underlies the deep affinity between Christian theology and Neoplatonism. He can thus praise the Platonists for their adherence to Plato’s so-called doctrine of Ideas, those immutable intelligibles that are taken to constitute the order that structures all existence, including human life.²³ In the view of this expression of theologia, principles of human action are deducible directly from the order of the whole, a possibility perfectly captured in Aquinas’s notion of natural law. But just so far as this is possible, politics must be diminished, its importance inversely proportional to the orderliness of the whole; if the order of the whole does directly structure human life, there is no reason to consider the political realm as a home for deliberation about the human good or to accord it the autonomy and significance it would thereby deserve (XVI. 106–8).²⁴

Yet Dante does both. He thereby signals his opposition to the identification of philosophy and metaphysics that underlies the depreciation of politics. And, with his opposition, he challenges the harmony between humanity and the whole that this identification presumes.

The absence of this presumed harmony decisively alters the character of philosophy. In particular, as a result of humanity’s consequent distance from an understanding of the whole, the investigation of human nature and its good rightly occupies the heart of philosophic inquiry; if we need to seek knowledge, clarity regarding the origin of and obstacles to that search is of crucial importance. Accordingly, when Dante deems the Commedia a work of philosophy, he specifies it as a work of ethics, not metaphysics (Ep. XIII. 40).²⁵

With this specification, Dante rehabilitates what Aristotle, in linking the Nicomachean Ethics with his Politics, calls the philosophy of human affairs.²⁶ This philosophic consideration of ethics and politics has as its goal the self-knowledge that informs the unequaled seeing called prudence (Par. XIII. 104).²⁷ Philosophy so understood is neither a body of doctrines easily situated in a Christian framework nor a set of intellectual tools best used for predetermined theological ends. It is, instead, a way of life.²⁸ As such, philosophy requires politics: for its nurture, as its greatest spur, and as the most reliable guide for its central inquiry. Thus does the significance Dante finds in politics follow from his distinctive understanding of philosophy.

In this understanding there remains vital nourishment for us who call [Dante’s] time ancient (Par. XVII. 131, 119–20). For to revive the philosophy of human affairs Dante must show that inquiry regarding human good is necessary and possible, a matter of great contemporary concern. Currently, there is doubt on both these counts. One of the two contemporary intellectual authorities, modern science, rejects this inquiry’s necessity; the other, postmodernism, its possibility. The former does so believing there to be unquestionable certitude regarding our good, the latter because we know, again with certainty, that knowledge of good is unavailable. In either case, reason’s capacity to guide life is in doubt. Prior to accepting this conclusion, however, we should note that these certitudes, if only by their opposition, suggest the need for further inquiry. To the extent that Dante’s vindication of rational inquiry confronts obstacles that endure, his effort, with its acute self-awareness and searching spirit, can guide our investigation. The following outline of this vindication, as it emerges in Purgatorio, explicates this possibility.

Purgatorio and Philosophy as a Way of Life

The influence of the Nicomachean Ethics on Dante has long been noted—and rightly so: here, the thinker whom Dante deems the master of those who know put the finishing touches on moral philosophy and perfected it (Inf. IV. 131; Conv. IV. vi. 8, 15).²⁹ Although the authority of the Ethics is more explicit in Convivio, Dante’s unfinished prosemetrical work that antedates the Commedia, its influence persists in the latter and in the most significant way. Dante’s poem shares with the Ethics the protreptic character that gives the two works the same goal.³⁰ Both aim to turn their readers toward a better, happier life, understood by both to be the philosophic life. As I now sketch in more detail, it is philosophy so understood—as a way of life—that accounts not only for the meaning and prominence of politics in Dante’s poem but also his treatment of Christianity. I begin, however, by indicating why this understanding makes Purgatorio particularly significant.

As a work of ethics, the Commedia has a theoretical ground that leads to a practical goal.³¹ Lost, Dante must find himself so as to live a better life (Inf. I. 3). Accordingly, he writes of the Commedia, the whole as well as the part was conceived not for speculation, but with a practical object—namely, "to remove those living in this life from a state of misery, and to bring them to a state of happiness" (Ep. XIII. 40, 39, emphasis added). Dante expresses this same practical, this-worldly goal within the Commedia when, for example, as the fate of her chariot is about to unfold, Beatrice tells Dante: Therefore, for the good of the world, that lives ill, keep your eyes now on the chariot, and what you see, returning back there, be sure that you write (XXXII. 103–5).³² To borrow a phrase from the Ethics, the Commedia’s teaching concerns the actions pertaining to life.³³ This practical, pedagogical goal dictates Purgatorio’s primacy.

Among the three cantiche, only the purgatorial realm shares with earthly existence the qualities of temporality and change, which contributes to the traditional view that Purgatorio is the most human of the three realms.³⁴ Thus, given the Commedia’s protreptic aim, Purgatorio must be preeminent because here alone can that aim be fully portrayed.³⁵ Works that pursue such practical aims presume that humans are not automatically happy, that they must become so. Whether the approach recommended is teaching or habituation, whether these works regard us or our conditions as more in need of alteration, they all seek to effect changes in our current condition that enable us to live happier, more fulfilling lives. This being the case, Dante’s intention must emerge most clearly in this realm of mutability. Appropriately, nowhere else in the Commedia, apart from its introductory initial canto, is Dante as explicit about the profound change in his own life as he is in Purgatorio (III. 119–23, XXIII. 115–26, XXX. 106–45; Inf. I. 2–3).

Locating the passageway of Purgatorio between the eternities of Inferno and Paradiso, Dante depicts this middle realm as a school, a place where the transformation inherent in education can occur. This remarkably novel (and rather puzzling) pedagogical conception of Purgatory offers a further reason to give primacy to Purgatorio. Constrained by significantly fewer theological precedents, Dante employed what Peter Hawkins calls greater imaginative liberty in crafting Purgatorio than was available to him regarding either Inferno or Paradiso.³⁶ It is Dante who makes Purgatory a mountain, relocating it from the underworld to its terrestrial location at the antipodes from Jerusalem; it is Dante who places Earthly Paradise at the mountain’s peak; and it is Dante who casts Purgatorio as a school. Arguably, given this greater latitude, it follows that Purgatorio more clearly reflects Dante’s own purposes—from its smallest details to the amplified importance of a realm that had previously earned considerably less attention.

Both reasons for Purgatorio’s substantive centrality reflect Dante’s desire to redirect attention from that which is eternal and certain toward the concerns of those living here and now, chief among which is happiness. In Purgatorio Dante most clearly addresses those in doubt about how best to live, those still capable of fundamental change. And he invites such readers to join him in the ascent by which he justifies the ongoing inquiry into human good that is synonymous with the philosophic life.

This distinctive way of life had, in Dante’s time, recently reemerged from prolonged hibernation. Writing of the intellectual climate into which Dante was born, Steven Marrone notes that this view of philosophy had in its original iteration called for the engagement of the whole person in striving to know the truth and do good, which for philosophers themselves . . . amounted to an all-absorbing way of life.³⁷ He adds that in the generation just prior to Dante’s the ideal of a philosophical way of life carried on independently of religious institutions reappeared in the West for the first time since the days when pagan philosophers competed with ‘philosophized’ Christians.³⁸ This development, which elicited the dramatic reaction of Bishop Tempier’s 219 prohibited theses, was provoked especially by the impact of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, only recently translated into Latin.³⁹ The flashpoint concerned, first and last, the supreme human good of happiness. Aristotle’s works taught that the meaning of happiness could be sought by unaided human reason, and that it must be sought insofar as happiness takes a variety of irreducible forms.⁴⁰

Dante, however, should not simply be identified with the Latin Averroists or radical Aristotelians, who responded most enthusiastically to Aristotle’s call.⁴¹ Dante distinguishes himself from these by his recognition that the recovery of Aristotle’s genuine teaching demands the kind of reflection on its preconditions, theoretical and practical, that Aristotle himself undertakes.⁴² Adhering more rigorously to the spirit of Aristotle’s thought, Dante presumes neither its possibility nor its worth to be self-evident.

As a lived existence, philosophy has concrete preconditions. Insofar as these depend on the efforts one generation makes on behalf of the next, they require communal support. For Dante, the key to such enduring transgenerational efforts—including the appropriate education—is the law, written and unwritten, of a revitalized political community. For him, as for Aristotle, ethics and politics are intertwined because the best life is best nurtured within the political community. Charles Martel’s claim in Paradiso that it would be worse for man on earth if he were not a citizen requires no proof (Par. VIII. 115–17).

Related to this first rationale for politics’ prominence is, however, another deeper, more intimate link between Dante’s politics and the poem’s aim. The distinctive way of life that the poem prepares its readers to lead best emerges out of, and ultimately in tension with, a revitalized politics. By briefly clarifying this link, we can bring Dante’s view of philosophy into sharper focus, seeing more clearly why Dante considers it to be more than a body of doctrines or an array of intellectual tools.

Dante’s revitalization of politics seeks to restore the political community as worthy of admiration. Dante’s task does not entail a wholesale endorsement of the classical polis; among other considerations, the radically altered circumstances would prohibit its restoration.⁴³ But Dante does intend its orientation to become a prominent element of his culture.

To be more precise, Dante intends to make salient Aristotle’s understanding of the polis. He takes his bearings from the Ethics’ notion of ethical virtue and the nobility that Aristotle designates as its telos. Aristotle suggests nobility’s meaning, the theme to which Dante himself pivots in the last book of Convivio, by introducing it as ethical virtue’s purpose in his discussion of courage.⁴⁴ Aristotle thus stamps the noble life as devoted to something beyond mere self, something for which life itself might be risked. This noble or beautiful devotion has in view a notion of human wholeness deserving of others’ admiration.⁴⁵

With his distinction between true courage and political or civic courage, however, Aristotle, plants a question—Does my community deserve such devotion?—that beckons the attentive reader beyond patriotism.⁴⁶ Dante’s rethinking of the first three sins treated in Purgatorio legitimates this notion of nobility. But Dante, too, uses the profound tensions generated in this lofty politics to provoke reflections that can impel readers through and beyond political life.

The political community that has this noble life in its sights aims at more than the efficient satisfaction of corporeal needs. It responds to the entire range and diversity of human desires.⁴⁷ In doing so it expresses those conflicts—between common good and individual fulfillment, ethical virtue and happiness—rooted in the nature that situates humanity between beasts and angels (DVE I. ii. 1–5, iii. 1–3).⁴⁸ Reflection on these conflicts generates questions about the meaning of justice and, more deeply, of good that persist as long as these conflicts endure.

Yet, needing to respond promptly to various exigencies, the political community can only approximately resolve these conflicts. To do so it relies on the law, an amalgam of reason and unreason, persuasion and coercion. Accordingly, those who desire to investigate justice and good via reason alone must pursue their inquiry beyond the law. Virgil’s exit from the Commedia marks this border (XXX. 49–51, XXVII. 139–42).

Here is the ultimate goal of Dante’s revitalized politics: to illustrate, as vividly as possible, humanity’s in-between nature and the conflict of goods to which it gives rise. Put otherwise, reflection on the tensions made palpably and dramatically evident in serious politics, in the limits of the law, best reveals the problematic unity of the human soul.⁴⁹ And it is this problem that provides the enduring impetus for the transpolitical inquiry regarding the human good.⁵⁰

Because the Commedia’s ultimate aim is to turn its readers toward the life defined by this inquiry, politics must occupy the extraordinarily prominent place it does in the poem. The immeasurably heightened significance—and autonomy—politics thus acquires sparks controversy about Dante’s orthodoxy. Yet Dante takes that risk just because the law, written and unwritten, of such a community does play an essential role in the nurture of and spur to the life, ultimately transpolitical, that he judges most choiceworthy. Purgatorio rehabilitates a version of the Earthly City to prepare the life available in Earthly Paradise.⁵¹

If its philosophic significance accounts for the meaning and ubiquity of politics in Dante’s poem, then it is not a metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Commedia.⁵² The tensions within us from which arise the questionability of our good make this view dubious. More specifically, these tensions reflect the distinctive character of humanity that subverts the Neoplatonic hope of deducing universally applicable principles of human action from the order of the whole.⁵³ For this reason, very near the heart of Purgatorio, and hence of the Commedia, Dante lets us see that love—the conscious lack that must be the seed in you of every virtue and of every action that deserves punishment—cannot be explained by reference to principles that explain all things (XXVII. 104–5). In the absence of perfect harmony between humanity and the whole—whether expressed as natural law or as unity of the contemplative human mind with the divine—inquiry into human affairs takes philosophic precedence.⁵⁴

As the vastness of the Commedia’s vision testifies, in giving human affairs philosophic primacy, Dante does not at all circumscribe his view.⁵⁵ He continues to seek understanding of all things. But he does so with an approach that takes with utmost seriousness the limits inherent in Aristotle’s qualification: but blessed human beings.⁵⁶ In light of our distance from a rational account of all things, self-knowledge, the knowledge of our limits, most available through reflection on politics, becomes most needful. This knowledge provides the clearest view of where, cognitively, we actually do stand. Moreover, it checks the urge—inevitable in light of the distance from comprehensive understanding—to believe we know with more precision than we do. Dante makes central this inquiry into the soul and its good to liberate the philosophic life from any hint of metaphysical dogmatism, whether based on faith or on reason. Ulysses’ ill-fated quest for knowledge explored the world without people; Dante’s, running straight through political life, avoids Ulysses’ disastrous end (Inf. XXVI. 117).

Understanding philosophy in this manner, Dante returns to its original, literal sense as the love of wisdom.⁵⁷ We love or desire, and thus seek, what we lack—in this case, a clear understanding of human good. As long as the lack persists, so does the search. The persistent need for this search, this ongoing inquiry, defines philosophy as a way of life. It is a life defined by the distinction between wisdom sought and wisdom possessed, between the philosopher and the wise man. This distinction, most evident in Purgatorio, is Dante’s deepest response to the aberrant path that left him lost in a dark wood (Inf. I. 2–3).

From this distinction arises this life’s most daunting obstacle. Devoted as it is to the love of wisdom, the philosophic life is not only perfectly compatible with persistent desire, it presumes it. Persistent desire, however, presumes persistent need, and such a needy existence rules out complete satisfaction. In this life, our finite nature imposes limits on the scope of knowledge, not to mention existence. Dante’s great challenge is to articulate the possibility that a happy life need not await the complete satisfaction unavailable in this world. To justify his poem’s title, Dante must show that such a life is consistent with ongoing need and desire.⁵⁸

This being his goal, his ascent cannot be said to culminate in the supernatural order to which nature must ultimately give way, nor is it the case that in "Purgatorio . . . the goal is supernatural happiness, for which philosophy is definitely not sufficient."⁵⁹ Rather, as I aim to show, in Purgatorio Dante substantiates the possibility that happiness, insofar as it is the distinctly human fulfillment, is wholly natural, that it is, in fact, inseparable from natural limits. This view of happiness, figured in the earthly paradise, consists in the exercise of our own virtues (Mon. III. xvi. 7). At its peak, this exercise is nothing other than the ongoing inquiry into the human good that defines the philosophic life.

In this way does Dante address the question that animates the work of Plato and Aristotle: What can be the good for a being capable of asking the question of its good? His recognition of the questionable character of our unity and the consequently questionable character of good underlies his widely acknowledged appropriation of the classical view. Nevertheless, as a careful student of Aristotle, Dante knows that his effort cannot be simply restorative.⁶⁰ The pervasively Christian world in which he writes places him in a context distinct from that of the classics. If I am right about Dante’s goal in Purgatorio, Singleton’s characterization of the Commedia needs to be revised. But the poem’s intent cannot be fulfilled without the most serious treatment of Christian doctrine. Such a treatment is, in fact, intrinsic to Dante’s understanding of the philosophic life.

Conceived as bodies of knowledge, philosophy and theology could agree on various doctrines. Moreover, understood in Augustine’s Platonic phrase as reason or discourse concerning divinity, theology could employ philosophic reason as its instrument.⁶¹ If, however, philosophy is a way of life, an ongoing inquiry, the picture changes completely. So understood, philosophy resists subordination to, and even harmonization with, theology. When one life requires ultimate obedience to authoritative doctrines, while the other demands relentless questioning of those same doctrines, friction must result. Still, relentless questioning is the opposite of neglect. In pointing to the need for sustained inquiry into human good, the Commedia does indicate that what is already conceptually elaborated and established in Christian doctrine is insufficient. But neither can it be ignored. Just as doubts about the comprehensive efficacy of reason do not substantiate faith, questions about faith do not substantiate a comprehensive rational account of all things. To adopt the latter stance is to exchange faith for unreasoned rationalism. Dante’s inquiry would be deficient, neglectful of its own justification, if it omitted an unblinking examination of faith, reason, and the relationship between them. It would forfeit the self-knowledge that is his inquiry’s goal.

This goal dictates Dante’s treatment of Christianity. Dante’s endeavor responds to a culture of passivity, born of doctrines, religious and philosophic, oriented on comprehensive certitude. From this universalizing standpoint, human action can seem insignificant. In response to the consequent enervation, Dante does not simply oppose classical practice to Christianity; his poem testifies to the worth he finds in Christianity’s emphasis on human interiority and the disruptive perspective of eternity. Nor does he propose a grand synthesis of the contending views, a precursor to the Renaissance’s Christian humanism.⁶² Rather, in the spirit of Aristotle’s philosophy of human affairs, he seeks to preserve the genuine and deep differences between them. The tension between Eden and Parnassus fuels the love of wisdom, the engine that, in opposition to enervating certitude, sets humanity back in psychic motion. To rekindle that love demands the reasoned rejection of dogmatism, whatever its source—an undertaking still worthy of emulation.

In encouraging the philosophic life, Dante cannot, nor does he seek to, exempt himself or his readers from the intellectual challenge of Christianity. He does distance philosophy from the domestication and consequent diminishment it underwent in Christianity’s care. But, especially in light of its creedal character, Christianity can play a crucial role in the intellectually diverse and vibrant community Dante’s political project aims to establish. A community that comprises Christianity and the classical view would have ever in mind the conflict between equality and inequality at the heart of the problem of justice. In addition, Purgatorio shows Christianity to be an inexhaustible source of reflection, compelling questions about the character of the highest being, the relative scope of human and divine power, and the body’s place in the puzzle of the human whole.⁶³ All these arise in the struggle to account for personal immortality, which, in this central cantica, becomes thematic.⁶⁴ For the sake of the philosophic life, Dante seeks to preserve intact Christianity’s power to elevate humanity’s sights, deepen self-understanding, and make salient the question of humanity’s place in the whole. In sum, the challenge of an intellectually vigorous Christianity helps forestall any lapse into dogmatic rationalism.

Arguably, through these efforts Dante seeks also to benefit Christianity. It gains specifically from the wedge his robust politics drives between justice and piety. As the closing passages of Purgatorio make especially clear, the church’s political pretensions had defiled it. Returning the administration of justice to the political realm, regarding it as a predominantly human concern, the impetus to enlist divinity in the service of political passions might subside. Piety could be liberated, free to be fueled not only by the desire to right wrongs but also by delight in the various and intricate beauty of the whole (XXVIII. 80–81). From awareness of human limits may spring the reasonable hope that, following Dante, with better voices, others will pray, their hopes likewise made more sober, indignation at their disappointment diminished (Par. I. 34–36; XXXI. 79–83).

In the Commedia, Dante does commit the poet’s sin, and he boldly calls attention to the innovations that flow from it. But the poem’s already audacious exterior both artfully shields and, in its artfulness, invites pursuit of a still deeper meaning.⁶⁵ Its deepest strand, I argue, defends a life spent searching for the meaning of the human good, a life whose conditions it aims to bring about. Dante’s poem thus performs the highest task of the philosophy of human affairs, that supreme form of prudence.⁶⁶ To read his poem, joining in the ascent by which Dante achieves this end, is to begin to live this life. If the poem is rightly understood in this way, Purgatorio must be judged not only as the literal but also as the substantive heart of the Commedia. In the following study I offer reason to think that this judgment is true.

Pedagogy, Poetry, and Interpretation

Dante’s pedagogy seeks to bring about what Plato’s Socrates calls a turning around of the whole soul.⁶⁷ When successful, such efforts result not merely in the exchange of one set of beliefs for another but in a new, liberated mode of existence. Our proxy, the student-seeker Dante, achieves this new life in the form of genuine self-governance. Arguments alone do not effect this radical change, especially when the new life involves ceaseless scrutiny of one’s most cherished beliefs. Bearing on issues that elicit heartfelt concern, these beliefs are defended by powerful passions. Through his pedagogy Dante must therefore address his and his readers’ hopes and fears as well beliefs. His teaching necessarily has both an affective and an intellectual dimension.⁶⁸

Both are evident in the Commedia’s first and last cantiche. Inferno concerns the fear that poses the greatest obstacle to Dante’s goal. But it does so according to a reconception of Hell’s architecture that follows what Virgil calls la tua ‘Etica’ (Inf. XI. 79–93). The severity of punishment corresponds directly to the sinner’s mistreatment of reason, those who pervert it being punished in regions deeper than those who omit it or who let reason succumb to passion. In Paradiso, Dante focuses on hope, which, unmoderated, can also obstruct his path. Thus, there he maintains and even spotlights the differences that cast doubt on the much hoped-for unity of all things. Purgatorio stands substantively between. Through the ascent undertaken in this realm, fear is reasonably subordinated to hope, never wholly supplanted by it.

His ascent takes Dante through a familiar moral topology that associates each of the mountain’s Terraces with one of the Seven Capital Sins. His journey does not, however, leave this familiar appearance untouched. As he ascends, Dante poetically reshapes it, his ascent propelled not by the punishments suffered by the penitents but by deepened understanding of their beliefs and accompanying passions. Through this reflective activity he develops an intellectual virtue, that of prudence (XXVII. 139–42; Par. XIII. 104–5).⁶⁹ This virtue, which characterizes the self-governing individual, requires that Dante also reorder his own desires and passions (XIX. 1–33).

The Commedia expresses his prudence in recognizing that his pedagogical efforts will meet with varying success; in the event, Dante finds Earthly Paradise very sparsely populated. What he calls the Commedia’s ‘polysemous’ character responds to the diversity of intellect and motivation in his audience (Ep. XIII. 20). Such a work has several meanings, with the words . . . addressed to one person and the meaning to another (Ep. XIII. 20; Conv. III. x. 6). Within the poem, Dante indicates several times that relatively few readers will be able to fully grasp its meaning (e.g., Par. II. 1–15). As Boccaccio writes, the Commedia is a river, gentle and deep, in which the little lamb may wade and the great elephant may easily swim.⁷⁰ Writing in this way, Dante emulates the ideal teacher who enables each student, whether lamb or elephant, to see the inadequacy of his or her views just so far as each is willing and able to do so. He justly gives to each what each most needs.

The characters that populate the poem are the vehicle of Dante’s polysemous meaning. Speaking not as disembodied entities but as individuals with distinct qualities, they occupy particular circumstances and, usually, possess particular histories. Poetry’s capacity for personification makes it supremely effective in addressing the affective dimension of Dante’s pedagogical aim. By presenting his thoughts in this way, Dante shows that he intends us to consider not only what characters say but also the particular perspective from which they say it, the how as well as the what, form as well as content. Anyone who would discern the Commedia’s meaning must consider at every moment what is said, how it is said, and the bearing of the one on the other—a formidable task. Dante intends this interpretive imperative, applicable to every serious poem, to pertain especially to his Commedia. He invites readers to consider his deeds as well as his words, to find as much significance in the poetic act by which he delivers a new revelation as in the details of its content.⁷¹ In Purgatorio, poetry serves Dante’s aim not only through its direct use but also through his reflection on its use.

Why should this be particularly true of the Commedia? We know that Dante’s poetic deed was risky; insofar as the Muses were not banished for frivolous reasons, their repatriation could not be cost-free. Yet by spotlighting his poetic activity, even as it converges with prophecy, Dante heightens the risk. His emphasis on the how of his work must be very important for the elucidation of its theme.

In fact, the poem’s form bears directly on its theme. Dante points so insistently to form because attention to it or, more precisely, attention to the possibility of attending to form, highlights the problematic character of the soul, the source of the poem’s essential concern. It is the capacity for reflection that enables us to abstract form from content. And it is this capacity, especially as self-reflection, that gives rise to the problem of the soul, that is, to those tensions that make the wholeness of the human elusive and our good a question. By continually inviting reflection on the poem’s form, Dante keeps this capacity—and this problem—steadily in view.

This is even more emphatically the case when attention to form calls for reflection on the act of