The Other Dante

Dante is generally known as the poet of Christendom for his monumental epic The Divine Comedy. If people are aware of additional writings from Dante, it is probably just the Vita Nuova. Few are familiar with Dante’s “other works,” his many epistles, letters, and other treatises ranging from philology to political philosophy. But those works are equally important to understanding the great sage whom T.S. Eliot placed alongside Shakespeare as the two greatest artists the West ever created.

Dante’s “Other Works”, a new anthology of essays by leading Dante scholars around the world, brings together a concise overview of the many other writings that the wandering pilgrim poet produced. Dante was more than just the poet of Christendom, a conceptualization that limits the greatness and profundity of the man. He was an author of all humanity, “humana universitas” as contributor Paola Nasti reminds us.

Looking at the breadth of Dante’s works there are some very insightful and remarkable chapters that can help scholar and lay reader alike in gaining a deeper appreciation of Dante. For the sake of this review, I shall contain this review to only a handful of the chapters: Dante’s lyric poetry (Rime), Vita, letters (epistles), and Monarchia. In this way, Dante the poet, Dante the writer, and Dante the political thinker and biblical scholar are revealed to us in ways that also help elucidate the Divine Comedy.

It is sometimes crudely presented that Dante’s lyric poetry is “infant” compared to his other works (especially the Vita and Comedy). This view of Dante’s lyric poetry, though, is undeserved according Manuele Gragnolati. As our author notes, “it is possible to detect a general development in the style of Dante’s lyric poetry, first toward the simplification of the dolce stil novo phase, and then toward a greater intensification and density.” Far from simplistic and infantile, Gragnolati highlights how Dante’s poetry “show great range and variety” alongside innovation and refinement. Dante’s lyric poetry should be read as a complementary gateway to the Vita, Comedy, and other writings of greater renown. In fact, Gragnolati convincingly shows how we are enriched by having a higher understanding of Dante’s lyric experimentalism that reached maturity and fruition in his more famous works.

If there is another “major” work of Dante’s beside the Comedy, it would be the crown jewel of the so-called “minor” works (the other works under discussion here), the Vita Nuovo (or Vita nova). Posterity may be aware that the Vita was Dante’s love poem to Beatrice, but the poem is more than particular in its love paean to Beatrice, it is also universal in its nature and scope. Zygmunt Baranski gives a spirited reading of why the poem has such universal appeal despite its conditional particularity, “the Vita nova oscillates between the subjective and the universal; and it is the work’s universalism, its privileged position within the intricacies of a theocentric reality, that serves to legitimate and to begin to account for the breadth of its concerns.”

Baranski asserts, and implies between the lines, that the particularist and de-theologized readings of the Vita harm our understanding of the poem. Yes, the poem is about Dante and Beatrice. But the poem is more than just them, for the love of Dante for Beatrice is also universal because of the “theocentric reality” nature of love the pilgrim-poet sings of. Likewise, attempts to de-theologize the poem, turning it into just another love poem among the love poems of the Renaissance fails to acknowledge the work as “a thickly stratified and complex text.” Allusions and references to Saint Augustine and Boethius abound and reveal Dante’s theological learning. The poem’s engagement with other love poetry reveals Dante’s dialoging with other prominent love poets. Dante is simultaneously theological scholar and poetic critic from within the pages of the Vita. To ignore the theocentric heart of the poem is to ignore the contours and influences that made Dante a true genius.

Even if the Vita is mostly remembered as Dante’s love song to Beatrice, the poem also synthesizes Aristotle with Christian theology and the emergent romance tradition of poetry from the Troubadours alongside the revealed love of God. Baranski concludes by reminding us, “Different intellectual and cultural activities could be brought together. The local and the universal could integrate. Dante was ever a syncretist; and the plurilingual Vita nova marks his first serious effort and achieving synthesis.” Baranski’s chapter reveals to the reader the breadth and scope of Dante’s ambitious project, how philosophy and theology, poetry and prose, love and reason, the universal and particular, could all be interwoven together. And interwoven together it was.

Dante the syncretist is further highlighted in Claire Honess’s examination of Dante’s epistles. Dante’s letters are replete “with a number of classical quotations and allusions, particularly from Virgil.” Any understanding of Dante must include some familiarity with the classics, especially the Latin classics, including Cicero and Saint Augustine who stand as additional prominent influences over Dante beside Virgil. But Dante’s borrowing of classical and patristic sources isn’t the only project his letters are engaged in. Dante was also attempting to bridge classical sources with the Bible.

In reading Dante’s letters, “we are brought face to face with a wealth of biblical references and allusions.” Not only the Bible, but politics as well. Dante relies on political theology amid the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict and we begin to see Dante’s path to Monarchia in his epistles. Dante presents himself as a new prophet in the Old Testament tradition and how it illuminates contemporary political conflicts. “Those who resist the emperor,” Honess writes in summarizing Dante’s views, “are like Saul, who persecutes not only the early Christians but also, by extension, Christ himself, a parallel that equates Henry, once again, with Christ.” Dante’s letters are multifaceted, combing classical culture with the patristic tradition and the Bible with contemporary politics.

This now permits us to look at Dante the political philosopher, or, more appropriately, the political theologian. The Guelph-Ghibelline conflict hangs over Dante the political theologian. But so does Augustine’s City of God. Augustine’s City of God offered a historiography of the earthly city that was very far removed from the political theories of Plato and Aristotle. Augustine saw the state as a necessary evil and that the human good of love was, and could be, independent of the earthly city (indeed, it can only properly be associated with the city of God and not the city of man). This made Augustine unique among ancient political theorists, if we consider him one, insofar he divorced the highest good of existence from political life. Dante breaks sharply with his spiritual mentor in this regard, agreeing with the classical theorists that politics and the good life is an essential part of human nature and to be found in political society.

Rather than seeing the city of man, or the empire, as built on the libido dominandi (lust to dominate) Dante begins to articulate a revised view of politics “to demonstrate that the empire is a providential guide established by God to lead humanity to its earthly ends: understanding truth, achieving intellectual fulfillment, and living happily, justly, and at peace.” Monarchia, then, is part of the Renaissance confrontation with the Papacy (which is also found in Marsilius of Padua) and the attempt to reassert earthly “secular” authority against ecclesiastical overreach. It is profoundly conservative in nature in its defense of the Holy Roman Empire as well as innovative in its political historiography in overturning the Augustinian view of the Roman Empire as something bad. One might say Dante helps romanticize the Roman Empire from its deconstruction that occurred through Augustine’s writings.

At the same time as Dante is engaged in this tremendous political project, he is also employing biblical interpretation to underscore his point. Against the earthly papists he cites the Gospels and Jesus’s own words that “my kingdom is not of this world” to help ensure a separation between church and politics. In fact, Dante turns Scripture (and Augustine) against the papists who ignore Augustine’s own writings against the utopianism of earthly politics and Christ’s revelation of a spiritual kingdom. The church exists for the spiritual nourishment of souls, but “the monarchy is also a providential and eschatological reality” that permits “the perfect human constitution [based on] the will for peace and order decreed by God.”

What Dante achieves in Monarchia is to offer a political theology that unites God (in the abstract) with earthly politics while separating the church from the earthly city and relegating its authority to the domain of the purely spiritual, thus eliminating the “two swords” doctrine that had been enforced since the time of Theodosius. Dante, in many ways, prefigures the eventual political and civil theologies of the Enlightenment and the American Constitution.

Dante’s “Other Works” is a wonderful exposition on the complexity of Europe’s greatest poet, the poet of Christendom but also a poet of the universal and syncretic. Dante’s many writings reveal his ecumenical spirit, his ability to bring together classical culture with medieval culture, poetry and prose, politics and theology, romance and chastity, theology and science, beauty and language. Any lover of Dante would do well to pick up this volume to gain a deeper appreciation of the man T.S. Eliot placed alongside Shakespeare. In reading the many chapters of this book, we might even go as far as placing Dante above Shakespeare and that Shakespeare stands on Dante’s shoulder.

Dante’s “Other Works”: Assessments and Interpretations
Edited by Zygmunt Baranski and Theodore Cachey Jr.
South Bend: University of Notre Press, 2022; 474pp

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