Michael Knowles EXPLAINS Dante’s Divine Comedy
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Please pardon this interruption to your regularly scheduled TikTok reactions and political hot takes. We are going to have a much hotter political take because we together are going to delve through the politics of my favorite poet,

one of perhaps the greatest artists ever in history, Dante Alighieri, the author of The Inferno, as well as Purgatorio, as well as Paradiso, known together as The Divine Comedy. I gave a lecture this summer at the ISI Honors Program on the politics of pilgrimage, the redemption of politics in Dante's Divine Comedy, as well as his other writings.

a little bit more academic and perhaps a little drier than much of what comes on this channel but I know that all of you out there are very serious people creme de la creme real kinds of sophisticated intellects and so I hope you enjoy this journey through hell and purgatory and heaven and politics thank you so much very warm introduction and a great plug for Mayflower cigars

It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me. A real privilege to join everyone for the ISI Honors Program. I want especially to thank Johnny for indulging me with this invitation. Virtually every other lecturer in this program is a scholar with advanced degrees and a laundry list of publications. I, on the other hand, possess no particularly advanced degree.

I'm a podcaster and a cigar salesman. I have written just two books and only one of them has any words in it. I am here because over cigars one evening after a campus speaking event last year, Johnny asked me what I would most like to lecture on and I told him Dante. I told him I'm sick of talking about politics and I want to talk about something that really matters.

And then the moment he gave me this opportunity, I realized that I would still have to talk about politics. Because Dante was a politician and even a political philosopher, and the occasion of writing his magnum opus, The Divine Comedy, came as a result of politics. Before we get into the poem, we need some historical context. Those of you who have read Dante before will notice this is a recurring theme. You need a lot of context.

Dante served in political life for just over seven years, from 1295 to 1301. There were two dominant political parties in Italy during his life: the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. The Guelfs supported the Pope. The Ghibellines supported the Holy Roman Emperor. Dante was a Guelf, and he fought the Ghibellines at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289.

The Guelphs won, and then immediately after the victory, they split into two factions: the whites, who wanted to limit the temporal power of the Pope, and the blacks, who wanted even more temporal power for the Pope. Dante was a white Guelph, a pro-Pope but also pro-Emperor kind of person. He was the Rhino of his age. He was a Guino, a Guelph in name only.

Eventually, the whites took control and Dante ascended to Florence's supreme governing council, which is the Priorate, on June 15, 1300. This is a very important date because it occurs historically just two or three months after the action of the comedy.

Dante begins to write the comedy in 1308, he finishes in 1321, but the events occur in the year 1300 over the course of seven days from Maundy Thursday through Easter Wednesday. Dante served in the Priory for two months.

In 1301, the whites and the blacks appealed to Pope Boniface VIII to resolve the conflict. You can infer what Dante thought of Pope Boniface VIII by the fact that Dante signals his damnation in hell three years before the Pope dies. With some good reason, we might say.

While Dante was entreating Boniface to help settle the civil war in Florence, Boniface sent Charles of Valois, a brother of King Philip IV of France, into Florence with the Black Welfs to ransack the city, slaughter Dante's friends, and exile the whites, including Dante, who was stripped of his property and threatened with death should he ever return to Florence. And he never saw his native city again. Now I know what you're thinking.

Who cares? Why do I need to know about all these political minutiae to appreciate a poem about the afterlife? Isn't the point of eternity that we don't need to care about all this historical trivia?

A friend of mine, a very intelligent, extraordinarily well-read friend, made this same complaint to me. He said that he loves Dante because of the cosmic vision of the poem, but he hates Dante because Dante demands so much political and historical context. The references are just so particular. John Milton does not demand that we memorize the annual register of roundheads in order to enjoy Paradise Lost.

Dante insists that we learn about "Forese Donati" or "Henry VII of Luxembourg," "Charles of Anjou," and so many others. This friend of mine, in his exasperation, said that the poem could really be titled "The Divine Comedy" or "Guido Pizzarelli Gets His." But that's the point. Politics and the particularity of politics are crucial to understanding Dante's vision.

Because Dante understands that politics is the medium through which our salvation occurs. We are pilgrims who will reach our final destination, wherever that may be, only through history. The journey of our life will not occur through teleportation.

Our pilgrimages entail particular deeds done with particular people in particular places, as well as particular words said in particular languages. Languages which are, as Dante's decision to write the comedy in the vernacular underscores, historically contingent and constantly changing.

If one were inclined toward academic jargon, one might say that Dante understands the whole cosmos through a hermeneutic of particularity. There is no escaping history. For us, there is no neutral or eternal standpoint. We must always be moving in our minds, in our hearts, and in our bodies, because this is not our home. We are all exiles.

The particularity of Dante's exile from Florence is a literal representation of humanity's allegorical condition since our first ancestors ate the forbidden fruit. All of history is and must be understood to be a kind of exodus. Dante makes this point explicit in a letter to his patron in Verona, Cangrande della Scala. Dante writes: "The sense of this work, of the comedy, is not simple.

The first sense is that which comes from the letter. The second is that which is signified by the letter. And the first is called the literal, and the second allegorical, or moral, or anagogical. Anagogical meaning from the end times, from the eschaton, a mystical sense. Dante points to the story of Exodus. He quotes Psalm 113, which he again quotes in Purgatory.

"When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion." Dante says in the letter to Cangrande, the literal meaning is the exit of the children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses. The allegorical meaning is our redemption done by Christ. The moral of the story is the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the status of grace.

And the anagogical sense is the leave-taking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. One line, four layers of meaning. To ask why Dante needs to include all these obscure references to political figures of the 13th and 14th centuries is to ask why God needs to lead a particular people at a particular time from Egypt to Jerusalem.

It is to ask why God needs to send his particular son to be born of a particular woman in the fullness of time, in a particular town, under the rule of a particular emperor, to die on a particular cross. That is simply how God tells his story, which is to say that is how the story is told. We tell our stories with letters. God tells his story with us. Dante begins his story in a similar way.

with the literal and the allegorical, the particular and the universal, all immediately apparent. He begins, "In the middle of our life's journey, I found myself in a dark wood." Dante is at this point 34 years old, he's about to turn 35, which is middle age according to Psalm 90, which for some of us in this room will be the first of many harsh facts that come up in Divine Comedy.

Beyond the language of me and I, there is something even more particular going on in the first lines of the poem. We notice the repetition of the same word three times. Three obviously is an important number to Dante. The poem is divided into three canticles: hell, purgatory, and paradise. The rhyme scheme is what's called terza rima. It's interlacing rhymes in triplets. And three obviously is the number of the divinity.

The repeated word is selva, wood. The translations don't preserve the repetition, but in the Italian we read, So in selvaja there's the meaning of savage too. We maintain that also in our language here.

But it is as if Dante said, "There's a wood that's a woody wood." Dante does not suffer from small vocabulary. So why the repetition? The answer, I believe, lies in Canto VI of Inferno, which is the first of the three political cantos. The comedy is so meticulously organized, it's so harmonious, that it can be read not only vertically but also horizontally.

So the sixes in the canticles are all political. And the reason for this is that the sixth day is the final day of creation before God rests, and it's the day when God creates man, who is the political animal. So canto six of Inferno is about the city, of Purgatory it's about the nation, and of Paradise it's about the empire. In Inferno 6, Dante refers to his political party, the white guelphs, and he calls them "la parte selvaggia,"

The party from the woods. And he does this because the central family of this party was the Cherokee, and the Cherokee come from a rural part outside of Florence. It seems to me, though I have never seen it in any commentaries on the poem, that this explains the repetition in the first lines. Especially when we consider Dante's arrival in the dark wood just before his ascent to the priory.

It seems to me that Dante is calling our attention immediately to the political cause of his losing the straight way. Some additional evidence for this view comes from Dante himself in a letter preserved by the historian Leonardo Bruni. Dante writes, "All my woes and all my misfortunes had their cause and origin in my ill-omened election to the Priory."

So, if my interpretation is correct, this means even the vaguest and most general scene in the poem, Inferno 1, is rooted in highly particular historical experience. Dante then encounters three beasts at the foot of a desert slope. The desert slope, the place of exile. He encounters a leopard, a lion, and a lupa, a she-wolf. And the she-wolf scares him the most.

Why is that? It seems to me, oh, do I know, I'm not a medieval Florentine, but it seems to me that a leopard and a lion are scarier than a she-wolf. So what is it about the she-wolf? We know later on Dante will connect the she-wolf with Avarice. Beyond that, we really don't know Dante's precise meaning. And I suspect we're not supposed to know. Because we usually don't understand the meaning of events as they occur. This is not Pilgrim's Progress.

In Dante's journey, just as in real life, we don't encounter giant talking allegories. We encounter literal events and figures with allegorical significance, no doubt, but allegorical significance that often eludes us, at least at first. In the fallen world, there is a distance between sign and signified, between symbol and symbolized. It is a distance present in language itself. Angels do not need language.

Angels' knowledge is directly infused. Humans need language because we're incarnate. So we communicate in perceptible sounds and scribbles. But there's a problem with our language. As a consequence of the fall, a chasm has opened between what we say and what we mean. This distance, this desert we might say, constitutes another kind of exile between word and meaning. We don't quite say what we want to say and we don't immediately grasp the meaning of symbols.

So politics is the particular things that happen, the full meaning of which we cannot know as they occur. And history is the record of politics, the significance of which we later interpret. But if we can interpret history, that means history is not merely literal. Every particular thing evinces some universal truth, and the universal is made manifest to us only through the particular. So what does the she-wolf mean? It seems to me the clearest connotation is political.

The she-wolf nurses Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. What strikes the most fear into Dante's heart, what most obstructs his path, is a political beast. A beast, we will read about 40 lines later, which lets no one pass her by, but so much impedes him that she kills him. We learn this from the first character that Dante encounters, Virgil, the poet of empire and history.

whose Aeneid tells the story of the founding of Rome, the universal empire transferred west from Troy to Italy through Aeneas, who happens to be the ancestor to Romulus and Remus. Notice here, Dante's journey is not a straight shot to God. It is a journey incited by a particular individual, Virgil, whom we later learn was sent by another individual, Dante's beloved Beatrice, who's not even a public figure, who will then introduce Dante to another individual, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux,

who will serve as the final guide on the pilgrim's journey, which is mediated at all times by real and specific people. When Dante sees Virgil in the great desert, he cries, "Miserere di me, whatever you may be, whether shade or true man." Dante does not quite meet Virgil. He meets the shade of Virgil.

"Not a man. I once was a man," Virgil explains. "My parents were Lombards, both Mantuans by birth. I was born under Julius, though it was late. And I lived in Rome under the good Augustus in the time of the false and lying gods." Virgil is not a man because men are irreducibly historic beings.

We are not souls flitting through eternity. We are incarnate creatures, composites of body and soul, and we can only ever be men by virtue of our place in history. Therefore, Virgil identifies himself by his political circumstances. Geographic, he's a Mantuan, and temporal, born under Julius. Which is not even true, by the way, because Virgil was born in 70 BC. Virgil was 21 years old when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

But Dante is connecting Virgil with the empire, with the perfection of the political order. Virgil speaks of the journey they're about to undertake, even of God himself in imperial terms. He refers to that emperor who reigns on high. And he informs Dante that they will not exit the wood by going up. Dante will not retrieve the straight path by virtue of his own intellect and will. To go up, he must go down. Dante is skeptical. He says, "I am not Aeneas. I am not Paul.

Why invoke Aeneas and Paul? What do those guys have in common? Two things. They both go to the immortal realm. Aeneas goes to the land of the dead to see his father. St. Paul goes to the third heaven. And they both go to Rome. Dante writes of Aeneas, He in the Empyrean heaven had been chosen to be father of mother Rome and her empire. And Rome and her empire, to tell the truth, were established to be the holy place where the successor of great Peter is enthroned.

Through this journey that you claim for him, he understood things that were the cause of his victory and of the papal mantle. Later, the chosen vessel, St. Paul, went there to bring back strengthening for that faith which is the beginning of the way to salvation. Virgil tells Dante that he must venture into the pit of hell, and the first thing Dante thinks of is politics. And this is not... It's amazing, but it's not a frivolous obsession.

For Dante, Rome is divinely imbued with authority. God the Father sent his only begotten son to be incarnate in the fullness of time into the Roman Empire. For Dante, Rome has a divine mandate to govern the whole world, attested to in the Gospel of St. Luke. Gospel of Luke says there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, which for Dante signifies, as he writes in his political tract Monarchia,

that at that time the Romans exercised jurisdiction over the whole world. For Dante, it's appropriate that the Romans governed the world because not only were they the noblest people, though he says they were, but also they're providentially formed, as we see in the marriages of Aeneas, who had three wives. He had Creusa in Troy, Dido in Carthage, and then Lavinia in Italy.

So he brings together all three continents, Asia, Africa, and Europe, in one man, under the headship of one individual. Who will fail, Dante asks, to recognize divine predestination in that double confluence of blood from every part of the world into a single man. The Roman Empire's divine mandate to govern is not only apparent but necessary, according to Dante, if Christ's sacrifice on the cross is to redeem all of mankind.

As Dante explains in Monarchia, "If the Roman Empire was not based on right, Adam's sin was not punished in Christ." That is, this is still Dante, if Christ had not suffered under an authorized judge, that penalty would not have been a punishment. And no judge could be authorized unless he had jurisdiction over the whole of mankind, since the whole of mankind was punished in that flesh of Christ. So Rome had the special right to govern the world.

And this is good, Dante believes, because "mankind most closely resembles God when it is most a unity." Today, we worship diversity for diversity's sake. Dante, not so much. Mankind, he writes, is in its ideal state when it follows the footsteps of heaven, insofar as its nature allows, and since the whole sphere of heaven is guided by a single movement and by a single source of motion who is God,

Mankind is in its ideal state when it is guided by a single ruler. In other words, we ought to imitate the heavens, and the kingdom of heaven is not a democracy, or an oligarchy, or a tyranny, or any form of government other than universal monarchy, which Dante concludes is necessary to the world. So does this mean Dante hates freedom? Nothing could be further from the truth.

We hear in Paradiso 5 that the greatest gift that ever in his bountfulness God gave in creating and the most conformed to his goodness, the one that is most prized, was the freedom of the will with which the creatures with intelligence, all of them and only they, were and are endowed. Dante tells us in Monarchia that the human race is in its ideal state when it is completely free.

And that the first principle of our freedom is free will, which many people talk about but few understand. This is one of those moments where Dante is speaking directly into our own time, when so many people are so confused about what freedom really means. Dante distinguishes between true and false freedom. If judgment controls desire completely and is in no way preempted by it, it is free.

But if judgment is in any way at all preempted and thus controlled by desire, it cannot be free because it does not act under its own power, but is dragged along in the power of something else. Lord Acton summarizes this view pithily some centuries later when he says freedom is not the ability to do what we wish, but the right to do what we ought. Dante loves freedom, and it is because he loves freedom that he demands universal monarchy.

Because, as he tells us in Monarchia, "the activity proper to mankind considered as a whole is constantly to actualize the full intellectual potential of humanity, primarily through thought and secondarily through action as a function and extension of thought." And, "mankind most readily attends to this activity in the calm or tranquility of peace.

Universal peace is the best of those things which were ordained for our human happiness. And the only way to get universal peace is through a universal ruler. But then, doesn't this imply the merger of church and state? Church, you got one leader. State, you got another leader. Don't you have to put them under one guy? Not for Dante. Dante's enemy, Pope Boniface VIII, certainly thought that's what it meant. And he argued that in 1302 in his papal bull, Unam Sanctam.

Boniface argued that all power on earth lies ultimately with the Pope, that even the Emperor is subordinate to the Pope. To defend this claim, Boniface made a couple of perhaps dubious scriptural arguments that we don't have time to delve into, and maybe we can get to it in the Q&A. Boniface also relied on the donation of Constantine, which is a document later proved to be a forgery, in which the Emperor purportedly transferred authority for the Western Roman Empire to the Pope. Dante says no.

Even if Boniface's questionable readings of scripture were accurate, even if Constantine had really attempted to transfer political authority to the Pope, nevertheless, it would not be possible. Because on earth, everything has limits. Even the keys to the kingdom of heaven, Dante argues, which our Lord gives to St. Peter, the power to loosen, to bind, even that cannot be absolute because Peter cannot do anything that God himself cannot do. Peter could not, for instance, absolve an unrepentant sinner.

Peter could not loose a wife from her husband and dissolve the matrimonial bond. There are limits, not only to the power of the emperor, but to the power of the pope. Those limits derive from the nature of their respective offices, and the distinction between the offices derives from the fact that man himself has two natures: a corruptible bodily nature and an incorruptible mind.

Mankind, therefore, having two natures, necessarily has two ends: happiness in this life and happiness in eternity. The political order, the empire, is meant to serve man's temporal happiness; the spiritual order, his eternal happiness. And yet, Dante does not call, as later political thinkers will, for a firm separation between church and state. On the contrary, he concludes by warning that his argument should not be taken so literally

as to mean that the Roman prince is not in some sense subject to the Roman pontiff, since this earthly happiness is in some sense ordered toward immortal happiness. Let Caesar therefore show that reverence towards Peter, which a firstborn son should show his father, so that illumined by the light of paternal grace, he may the more effectively light up the world over which he has been placed by him alone, who has ruled over all things spiritual and temporal."

The Pope and the Emperor have distinct realms of action, but we cannot totally separate the temporal and the spiritual, just as we cannot separate the literal from the allegorical or the particular from the universal. Now, having digressed for all of that context, let us move on in the comedy to the pre-political canto, Canto V of Inferno.

Dante here encounters Francesca da Rimini, who had an affair with her brother-in-law Paolo, both of whom are killed by her jilted husband when he discovers them. Paolo and Francesca fall in love, she tells us, while reading. They read the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. And here Dante makes an important point about language. I'm going to read this in the Italian. Don't worry if you don't have the Italian. Just listen to the language.

Amor, this is the Francesca speaking. Amor che al cor gentil ratto saprende prese costui della bella persona che mi fu tolta e il modo ancor m'offende. Amor che a nullo amato amar perdonna, mi prese del costui piacer si forte che come vedi ancor non m'abbandonna. Amor condusse noi ad una morte. Caina attende che vita ci spense queste parole da lor ci fuor porte.

I won't translate the whole thing. She says, Love, which is quickly enkindled in the gentle heart, love, which does not pardon any beloved from loving, love led us to one death. That last phrase, Amor conduce noi ad una morte. Amor means love, una morte, death. Love is right in the middle, precisely in the middle of their one death. This line is untranslatable.

You can get the gist of it in Italian, or you can get the gist of it in translation, in English or any other language, but it really only works in the Italian. Dante is showing us something here. He's not just showing off his poetical skill, it's amazing, but he's showing us something about language. And he tells us this explicitly in his essay on language, De vulgari eloquentia, that particular languages are appropriate for particular works and particular writers. Not only do different circumstances call for different forms of language,

the high grammatica of Latin versus the vulgar vernacular. But writers have a special obligation to use their own native tongue, their own native vernacular, simply by virtue of that vernacular being their own. Dante writes in the Banquet, which is his philosophical tract, of the perpetual shame and mortification of the wicked men of Italy who praise the vernacular of others and disparage their own.

Dante condemns his own teacher, Brunetto Latini, for this very crime, for betraying the vernacular. He also puts him in hell for another reason, which we can get to maybe in the Q&A. It's a little bit of a saucier reason. But he's there. He is there, and the point that Dante is making, because language is particular. There's an old expression, tradutore traditore. The translator is a traitor. Individual experiences are not interchangeable.

We see this more fully in Canto 31 of Inferno when Dante meets Nimrod, who builds the Tower of Babel. And when Dante meets him, Nimrod says, and this will be in your translations too, not just the original, Nimrod says, which is untranslatable not because of some pun in Italian, but because no one has any idea what language that is.

It would appear there are theories about it, many of which are not persuasive. It seems to me the phrase is nonsense, which in itself is meaningful. Observing the Babel Tower builders, the Lord says, "Behold, they are one people and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do, and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them." So he confused their language and scattered them over the face of the earth.

The combination of political and linguistic unity would have unleashed invincible evil upon the world. So God disrupted temporarily their political unity and he permanently severed their linguistic unity. Now we see a chasm between what is said and what is understood. A chasm which is itself merely an exaggeration of the gap that appeared between word and meaning at the time of the fall. Nimrod attempted to short circuit the particularity of politics and history.

He transgressed the limits placed on man at the fall. We learn more about this fact in Paradiso 26 when Dante meets Adam, who explains that "the tasting of the tree in itself did not cause so long an exile, but only going beyond the sign." Very important phrase, which is sometimes mistranslated, but he says "going beyond the sign." Adam, in disobedience, figuratively goes beyond the sign.

And as a result, there emerges a distance between literal signs, that is words, and the meanings that they signify. In Paradiso 26, Adam corrects Dante's earlier belief, articulated in De Vulgari Eloquentia, that Hebrew alone survived the confusion of languages at Babel. That Hebrew, as Dante believed when he wrote De Vulgari Eloquentia, that Hebrew is in fact the original language created by God, undisturbed by time.

Dante believed this, that this had to be the case, so that our redeemer, who was to descend from them insofar as he was human, should not speak the language of confusion, but that of grace. Adam says, "No. The language that I spoke was all extinct before Nimrod's people became intent on the unfinishable work. This is because," he says, "no rational effect, because of human preference which changes following the heavens, has ever been enduring."

Nothing, nothing is immune from history. God himself enters into history and the word himself speaks a language that is contingent, particular, and constantly changing. Even the names we call God we hear change. First Adam tells us we called him E, then we called him L, now we call him something else. Adam says this is necessary for the usage of mortals is like a leaf on the branch which departs and another comes.

The usage of mortals changes because, as Dante says in De vulgar eloquentia, "Nothing can be conveyed from one reasoning mind to another except by means perceptible to the sense." And percepts are always changing. God does not change, but everything else does, including the names we call God. This is one reason Dante chose to write the comedy in the vernacular. For some of his minor works, he chose the high language of Latin.

For his magnum opus, he chooses the low vernacular. To go up, we must go down. So let's go back down to Francesca for just a moment. Final point on language. Francesca attempts to translate the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, and she makes an interpretive error. She confuses the life of the characters for her own life. And this leads to her death and to her damnation. And this terrifies Dante. The canto ends with one of the more famous lines of the poem: "Dante falling like a dead body falls."

Why does he do that? Because Francesca quotes Dante's own style of poetry back to him. Francesca alludes to a poem by Guido Guinizelli, who's the founder of the "Sweet New Style," which is Dante's school of poetry. And Dante fears that he might have played some role in her damnation, which is why the canto is, if not political, at least politics adjacent, because it reminds us that there is no such thing as purely personal sin. Man is the political animal.

What we do affects other people. Dante is telling us what the feminists will tell us seven centuries later. The personal is political. Now we come to the first political canto in "Ferno 6," which concerns Florence. This is the circle of the gluttons, and Dante meets a Florentine he doesn't recognize: Chaco.

When Dante asks Chaco to identify himself, Chaco says, your city, which is so full of envy that the sack already overflows, kept me with her during my sunny life. Your citizens called me Chaco. A lot's there. Chaco is like Florence. The city is like a body. It's the body politic. And political ills are like bodily ills. The glutton is filled to overflowing, just as Florence is filled to overflowing.

The allegorical meaning, Chaco tells us, is that Florence is overfull with envy. But there is a literal meaning too. There are too many people in the city. Florence had grown by leaps and bounds during Dante's lifetime and just before. Dante's ancestor Cacciaguida recalls this fact and this analogy in Paradiso 16 when he warns, "The mixing together of persons has ever been the beginning of harm to the city,

as excessive food is cause of your diseases. This argument follows Aristotle, who warns in the politics against the reception of foreigners in polities, as their presence has generally produced revolution. The practical politicians in this room will here find philosophical, poetical, and heavenly sanction to wear the MAGA hat and to build the wall. Kachiguita's in heaven, you know, he's giving good advice. But foreigners are not bad in themselves, they just don't fit.

They're just not appropriate. Polities and people are not interchangeable. Florence, like all polities, is not just an idea. Chocco traces the history of Florence through individuals and families. He recounts 86 years of Florentine history by recalling what happened after one Florentine nobleman plotted the murder of another Florentine nobleman because that nobleman jilted a Ghibelline girl for a guelph.

That is the story of Florence. In our ideological age, it is difficult to imagine that a romantic slight could be the immediate cause of a nearly two-century civil war. But sometimes it really do be like that. Dante actually traces the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict back to a single utterance by Mosca, the man who plots the murder, which is recalled in Inferno 28. A thing done comes to a head.

For Dante, history is civil war. A thing done invites revenge, and then more revenge, and then more revenge. And Moscow's utterance, which denies man's agency in the unfolding of history, constitutes the seed of evil for the Tuscans, according to Dante. This is the demise of the city. But cities die. As Cacciaguida tells us, cities have their end. The things of your world all have their deaths, just as you do. But in some it is hidden, for they last a long time and lives are short.

Politics is the indispensable medium in which our salvation occurs, but politics understood as an end in itself leads to death. So how do we attain the freedom to avoid this death? We find the answer in Purgatory, which opens with Cato, the great exemplar of Roman liberty. We meet in Purgatory II a friend of Dante, the singer Casella, who recites one of Dante's own poems back to him: "Amor che ne lamente mi ragionam" "Love which reasons with me in my mind"

This older poem of Dante's is important because it declares Dante's belief that love is a rational thing. He does this also in another famous poem, "Donne che v'ète intelletto d'amore," "Ladies who have intelligence of love." He's connecting love with intelligence, love with reason. Other people disagreed. Dante's poet friend Guido Cavalcanti, for instance, thought that love was irrational. The courtly love tradition treats love as a kind of madness that overtakes you.

Dante says no. Love properly understood is rational, which will help us to understand the famous final line of the comedy. Dante at the end, I'm skipping ahead obviously. Having glimpsed the beatific vision, Dante concludes, "Here my high imagining failed of power, but already my desire and will were turned, like a wheel being moved evenly by the love that moves the sun and the other stars." That love is not only rational, it is the logic of the universe.

And the concord between that rational love and the individual will is for Dante the substance of freedom. So the line that Casella sings to Dante is good and it's true and it's wonderful. And still, Cato yells at everybody for sitting around listening to it. "What negligence, what standing still is this?" Cato yells. "Run to the mountain to shed the slough that keeps God from being manifest to you. The souls have fallen prey to nostalgia."

Conservatives sometimes, we fall prey to nostalgia a little bit. And nostalgia is a danger not because the past is bad, but rather because it's past. And we're on a journey and we need to keep our eyes on the prize. History and the political order serve an important purpose. But the purpose is to point us beyond history and politics.

Dante and Casella are delighting in the sweetness of a poetical and philosophical intuition, but in so doing, they are forestalling the reality of that which they intuit and seek. The past is good because it's for the future. The polity is good because it's for a community beyond the polity. The particular is good because it's for the universal. History is good, but only in light of its end, which is the eschaton and the life of the world to come.

It's all about hope, which is the theological virtue oriented toward the future. In Purgatory 6, Dante asks Virgil whether prayer works. Virgil, in the sixth book of the Aeneid, denies that prayer has any efficacy. But the souls in Purgatory are all praying that God hasten their journey. So which is it? How's Virgil going to talk his way out of this one? Their hope is not deceived, says Virgil. Where I fixed this point, defect was not amended by praying.

because prayer was disjoined from God. But with the incarnation, God has entered into history and reunited man with himself. The pagans had no such communion with God. Crucially, they didn't even have hope for such a communion. So the pagans have hopeless eternity, Christians have hopeful history. We get what we desire, and our desires are mediated and shaped by the people we encounter, most perfectly by the God who becomes a man.

In the world of politics, things do not always appear hopeful. Hence Dante's invective in Purgatory 6 against Italy. "Ah, slavish Italy!" he cries, "dwelling of grief! Ship without a pilot in a great storm! Not a queen of provinces, but a whore! What does it profit that Justinian fitted you with the bridle if the saddle is empty? Without the bridle, the shame would be less." Emperor Justinian, whom we'll meet in Paradise 6, codified Roman law, the bridle on human action.

No offense to our libertarian friends, sometimes they say politics is downstream of culture, Dante sees the law as a tutor, as the bridle that reigns in our lower and destructive desires and thereby establishes the conditions for true freedom. But the bridle is useless if the saddle is empty. Law does nothing without a ruler to enforce it. So Italy has become a slave, having traded the liberty of the queen for the licentiousness of the whore.

Rome weeps, Dante says, widowed and alone, and day and night crawls out, "My Caesar, why do you not accompany me?" Italy is a bride in need of a bridegroom as the church is the bride of Christ. Dante cries out, "Ohaius Jove, who were crucified on earth for us, are your just eyes turned elsewhere?" The polity is the bride of the emperor, and this natural union is a figure of that supernatural union. The nature and the supernatural order are supposed to work together.

But they don't. The emperors, Albert and Rudolf Habsburg specifically in Dante's view, have abandoned their bride because of their covetousness. They preferred private interest to the common good. Albert and Rudolf show us that noble lineage does not necessarily confer true nobility. Dante says this is actually how God arranged it. Seldom does human probity rise up through the branches, and this is willed by him who gives it that it may be attributed to him.

All nobility is owed to God. It's not because you're from the Filuzzarelli line or something. Dante spells out this lesson more fully in the banquet. The divine seed, he writes, does not fall on a lineage that is on a family stock. It falls on individual persons. The stock does not make individuals noble. Individuals make the stock noble. Why? Because God alone bestows it on the soul for every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above. Here again, there's a tension.

On the one hand, Dante says, we are essentially creatures of social context, formed by historical, political, and legal circumstances out of our control. On the other hand, he says, we are essentially individuals whose stock will be ennobled or degraded according to the graces bestowed by God on us individually. So which is it? We find out in Purgatory 16, where Marco of Lombardy restates the problem.

"You who are alive still refer every cause up to the heavens, just as if they moved everything with them by necessity. If that were so, free choice would be destroyed in you, and it would not be justice to have joy for good and mourning for evil." In reality, Marco explains, the heavens begin your notions, your motions rather, and your notions I suppose.

A light is given you to know good and evil, and free will, which, if it lasts out the labor of its first battles with the heavens, afterwards overcomes all things, if nourished well. To a greater power and a better nature you lie subject and therefore free, and that creates the mind in you which the heavens do not govern. We are born in our circumstances, made by a happy maker. But then we taste the flavor of lesser goods, which we then pursue to our detriment,

Here's Dante: "If a guide or reign does not turn away our love for them, we need just rulers to direct our desires back toward reason. Therefore, you can clearly see that bad government is the cause that has made the world wicked and not nature corrupt in you. And the chief cause of this bad government is that the Church has usurped the power of the Empire.

Which brings out a beautiful paradox that becomes apparent in Purgatory 27, when Virgil bids farewell to Dante by saying, "No longer wait any word or sign from me. Free, upright, and whole is your will, and it would be a fault not to act according to its intent. Therefore, you over yourself I crown and mitre." Crown and mitre, state and church. The purpose of the separation of church and state on earth, in other words,

is that they be united in heaven. The purpose of our subjection to rulers is that we become free and whole as individuals. The purpose of our particular experience in time is universal blessedness in eternity. These apparent opposites are not really opposed. One is just the way to the other. Thus, Justinian tells Dante in the final canto of the political triptych,

Different voices make sweet notes. Thus different thrones in this our life produce a sweet harmony among these wheels. Dante's voice will be formed by the particular trials of his particular exile, as Cacciaguida foresees in Paradiso 17. You will experience how salty tastes the bread of another.

This is an inside joke, actually, because it refers to the saltiness of the tears coming down onto the bread. But it's also a joke about Florence because Florentine bread is famously made without salt. So Dante leaves Florence, the bread's going to taste very salty. It's a universal saltiness understood through a particular saltiness.

"You will experience," Cacciaguida warns, "what a hard path it is to descend and mount by another's stairs, the universal indignity of exile, but particular to Dante's." Here is another little play on words, I think. I haven't seen it elsewhere, but I think it's a little joke. Because Dante's patron is Cangrande della Scala. Scala means stairs. He actually dedicates this canticle to Cangrande and sends it to him. Notice the order though here.

We expect an exile begging patronage to ascend the stairs of the patron's court. The patron doesn't live underground, you expect him to go up and then down. But Dante says to go down and then up, which is the form of the poem and the form of salvation. As for Dante's fellow partisans, Cacciaguida warns, "Of their stupidity the outcome will provide the proof, so that for you it will be well to have become a party unto yourself."

So does this mean we should ignore politics? No. Dante has just insisted in excruciating detail upon the importance of politics even to salvation. Dante himself remained active in politics as a pamphleteer until the death of Henry VII in 1313. But Dante is reminding us that exile and salvation ultimately pertain to the individual. We are judged alone. "If I am a timid friend to the truth," Dante concludes,

I fear I will lose life among those who will call this time ancient." If Dante prefers political expediency to the truth, not only will he forfeit his salvation, he will lose even his significance in history. So having seen the face of God with memory failing and left only with sweetness in his heart remaining, Dante returns to earth to meet us, who are where he was in the beginning.

to guide us on our own particular pilgrimages and thank God for that. Thank you very much. Thank you, Sarah. I'm sitting here, huh? All right. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Michael. That was excellent. And we're going to be doing a Q&A and then we'll switch to audience Q&A. And for new guests...

Can you guys hear me now? Okay. For new guests, my name is Marlis Layback and I'm the director of programs. So thank you again, Michael. So I framed some of my questions. I'd like to do some application-based questions on Dante, especially after

observing your conversations this week and sitting in on your groups and talking candidly with you so one of the things I'd love to hear your thoughts on is um given your interest in social commentary is how Dante's Journey in the Comedia can help shape how we think about the relationship between men and women today so I know this is something on everyone's mind um especially as young as students um and and there's a very evident wedge between men and women that's

I think, inarguably has led to a lot of despair and confusion. So and what's so interesting about Dante is, you know, he's writing in the late medieval, early Renaissance period, and the role of women is really central to his work. So

Beatrice is his love, and she's his spiritual guide. Then you have Mary, Lucia, and Beatrice who make Dante's pilgrimage through the afterlife possible. And Dante even writes the Commedia in, like you mentioned, the vernacular Italian instead of Latin, which was readable. Women could read the vernacular Italian. So he wanted it to be this work that's accessible.

And you even see in Purgatorio, several male souls actually emphasize that there's a special powerfulness to the prayers of women that could shorten their time in purgatory. So, to Dante, men and women had these unique virtues.

in the afterlife, they're made equal. How do you think Dante can help us frame the issues we encounter today around the relationship between men and women, whether it's in our own personal lives or at the societal basis? - Well, yeah, Beatrice saves him, you know, sends Virgil down to take him out of the Darkwood. And it's probably worth establishing

Dante really doesn't know this woman very well. He sees her twice. He sees her for the first time when they're nine years old. And she dies quite young. But she's his muse. And he writes the Vita Nuova for her. And he says, but I'm going to write a poem that, you know, I'm going to write about you like no one's ever written about a woman before. You know, and it's kind of the prelude to the Divine Comedy. And...

So she is, you know, she's a Christ figure, she's Lady Philosophy, she's all of these things. And she's a little harsh too. So one part we didn't get to, we just obviously, you know, we'd be here for the next six months if we were to read the whole poem. But when Virgil says goodbye in purgatory, he hands Dante off to Beatrice.

Dante turns around and he's gone and he starts crying and Beatrice says, "Non piangere ancora, non piangere ancora." Stop crying. You know, like, that's her first line. You're waiting your love, you've gone through hell and now your first line is stop crying, you know, cut it out, act like a man. Don Corleone to Michael Fontaine. Johnny Fontaine. You all watched that movie actually this week, didn't you? Yeah, it's great. So,

All that to say, Dante, yes, he's writing for women. He recognizes that women have intelligence. The famous lines I mentioned briefly as an aside here, he writes this line, Ladies who have intelligence of love. So he's saying, first of all, women are intelligent. And two, love is intelligible. Love is a rational thing. And so he's also telling us that our love is rather powerful and driving us.

And so that final scene is Dante having his will and his desire, and what's the distinction between the two, maybe the higher will and the lower will, being turned like a wheel evenly by the love that moves the sun and the other stars. Each of the canticles ends with the stars. That's important too because star derives from, it's got an etymological root in the

for desire. So desiderare comes from the stars, like you're awaiting what's going to come from the stars for you. So ending each canticle on stelle is to invoke also this notion of desire. And so, you know, I'm egged on in my daily pursuits by sweet little Elisa, my Beatrice, and my Gemma Donati all wrapped up into one.

Paradiso is really about education. So each of the planets is about one of the liberal arts. And your education also should be about love. I mean, you're all here because you are very much attracted to something that you're learning for its own sake, or to have practicality in your life to draw you toward the good for its own sake. You're not here to get an internship on Capitol Hill. You could have done that, but instead you went to Delaware.

Why? Because you're drawn by your love to something which is good and which is going to guide you to the highest good. That's what I think we should do. To bring up Chesterton,

who's always good for a quote. You know, he observes that he knew that the church was some great or awful thing when he realized it was attacked for opposite reasons, for being too luxurious and for being too ascetic, for being too misogynistic and also too womanish, you know, full of women, basically, and all the masses. And I think we see this

This with Dante, you know, he's a man. I mean, he's about as virile as they get. And he recognizes the place of women and the complementarity of creation and how they can not only help him out in the way Eve helps Adam in the garden, but they can help him all the way up to heaven.

That's great. And so I want to I also want to talk about political factionalism and Dante placed heretics in the seventh circle of hell, but it was because they fueled factionalism and that divided not just communities, but families. So something that comes to mind that I'm sure you're familiar with, because I think Slate publishes the same piece every year about, you know, your MAGA grandpa or uncle, but Thanksgiving, you know, he's insufferable. You have to put up with him. Here's like a listicle about how to put up with that grandpa.

And this isn't necessarily a message of becoming complacent, at least from Dante's perspective, in the face of evil or corruption, however. But what are your thoughts on how to approach things like political division without straying too far off the path of virtue and into sin based off of your reading of the Commedia? Sure. Well, you mentioned the heretics, but Dante kind of jumbles up the heretics and the schismatics.

Because schism is usually grounded in some kind of heresy. And what is heresy? Heresy comes from the word for choosing. So you're just, you know, often heretics are not promoting vice necessarily. They're just choosing one virtue to the exclusion of others. Or they're choosing one aspect of Christian truth to the exclusion or reversal of others. So the problem there is division. And we know, having gone through some of Dante's political tract, Monarchia, that he places a great deal of importance on division.

universality and unity. And he's following St. Thomas Aquinas on this, and St. Thomas is following St. Paul and God in this, and following the heavens. So, you know, the unity is extraordinarily important. And here, I think, actually, going back to Kachiguita's advice, it can be helpful, which is, he says, you know, it will be good for you to have become a party unto yourself.

That's not like, you know, go vote for Evan McMullin or something. I mean, heaven forfend. But he's saying, you know, you have an obligation to the truth. You have political duties. I mean, even as Dante becomes a party to himself, he's still engaging in some political activity. But you have to recognize what the thing is for. So in his defense of monarchy, he says, look, politics is for politics.

And he feels this very, especially because his whole experience of politics is civil war. And they take his property and they threaten to kill him and they kill his friends. And so he just wants peace. And he recognizes that, you know, it's hard to have a career thing if you're not peaceful. It's hard to pray if there isn't peace. You know, the natural political order is for establishing the conditions that are conducive to natural human flourishing.

And that is for man's supernatural flourishing, which is happiness in eternity. So if you keep an eye on the prize, I think that rather tamps down the factionalism. To use your example, if you keep your eye on the good of family, which is a good thing actually,

that'll probably discourage you from, even if you're one of these purple haired half lesbian cousins who shows up to Christmas, it'll at least somewhat discourage you from haranguing your poor grandpa who probably fought in Korea or something, you know? And it'll, like, it might temper some of those irrational passions because you're keeping in mind, okay,

the dinner is not just a dinner you know the the election is not just an election it's actually for something and the thing that's for is peace and unity and making money having kids you know protecting our our borders and our basic security and oh yeah going to heaven too that's great and

So I asked about the relationship between Dante and Beatrice. And I'm sorry, I keep pronouncing that in Italian because I never get to talk. It sounds much better. Beatrice. I don't get to talk in Italian, so please bear with me. But what about Dante and Virgil, who you also mentioned, who's, you know, Virgil is a pagan, but Dante really admires and respects him. And he leads him through, you know, Inferno and Purgatorio. What Dante shows us with Virgil, though, I think, is that, you know, Virgil died without knowing Christ.

And there's something to learn from even pre-Christian Rome and its poets and philosophers. But Dante was also aware of this incompleteness that civilization had without Christianity. So what are your thoughts on how we think about that in this particular moment when we reflect on American life and

so many elements of it. We are in a post-Christian society, and I think some would even argue we're repaganizing. Yeah, it's a lot worse to repaganize is the problem. There's a lot to recommend the virtuous ancient pagans, but history happens. I mean, I guess this is broadly the subject of my talk. History happens, and you don't just live in eternity right now. You live in time. And so to not know Christ in antiquity

pre-incarnation is one thing. To not know Christ, you can't not know Christ now actually, everyone knows. You know, it's made it, you know, all the apostles went off, most of them to their deaths and Rome conquered the world and you know, they know. So you can't just not know Christ, you can't have an innocent kind of philosophical paganism like Aristotle or Plato had. You have to reject Christ.

And you don't even have the option to not know Christ. It's sort of there. We just live in a different context. Different choices are available to us than were to our forebears. There's this really sad moment in Purgatory when Virgil is talking to Statius, another Latin poet.

And Statius says to him, Statius makes it to purgatory. Virgil's stuck in hell, albeit the kind of nice part of hell. It's just perfectly pleasant, but totally hopeless. You know, it's like LA or something. Certainly no hope, but it's kind of nice weather. And so he's talking, and Statius makes it to purgatory. And Statius says, through you, I became Christian. But he didn't make it. You know, the guy who was the cause of his Christianity is in hell.

and that happens and then there's really again we just limited on time but we dante the eagle is an important symbol in purgatory and in paradise the eagle is the emblem of rome and it's the symbol of empire the eagle of justice and dante has to go to sleep in purgatory because now we're in time again you know hell is eternal but but we're in time again so he goes to sleep he has this dream

And, you know, there's an eagle. And then anyway, he encounters the eagle in paradise. And he asks the eagle, he says, hey, man, hey, Mr. Eagle, why is it that I've been given all these graces and all these other people have been given these graces? And well, to your point, some people didn't know Christ. Even today, what about the man standing on the Indus River who has never heard the name Christ? Dante asks the eagle. And the eagle's answer is,

Who are you? Who are you to ask me that? You know, the eagle's answer is God's answer to Job. Where were you when I made the heavens and the earth? You know, ours is not to know that in God's providence, which is so tightly knit, that, you know, not a sparrow falls without your father knowing it.

we ought to just have some joy for the graces that we've been given. And, you know, take up the Great Commission and spread the gospel and encourage a stable political order in which religion can flourish and souls can be saved. But it's a pity for those guys. At least the thing we can say about the virtuous pagans is they did get what they want. And that is a really simplistic takeaway from the comedy is people get what they want. You really do get what you desire. And

So if you want to do the Hunter Biden and you want to go smoke crack and do doodles and sell it to Ukrainian oligarchs, you can do it. There's no way of doing that and having a good life, but you really can do it and you'll get basically exactly what you deserve. And for the virtuous pagans, I guess what you deserve is half a million dollars. But I don't know, we'll see how it turns out. For the virtuous pagans though,

they don't have hope. The patriarchs from the Old Testament, they're not in hell. They had hope. Christ comes down from the earth. They don't have hope, and so the best they can think of, the best they can dream of is the Elysian Fields where you're just all hanging around bragging about your poetry or whatever, bragging about your philosophy books, and that's what they'll get forever. So for my last question before we go to audience Q&A, just to survey the room, who's read any part of the comedy?

All right. These ISI kids, man. This is good stuff. Who has read everything from the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Ceredizo? That's shocking. Okay. So my last question is something that a lot of

teachers of Dante complain about is whether it's through private education or public education, students tend to only read the Inferno. They don't go to purgatory or heaven. And what's your, how do you start? You know, you're more or less, you know, you were very self-motivated to learn the comedy. If you want to read the comedy and maybe you've only read, you know, a part of it, what's your best advice for tackling all parts of it?

Thanks for this. To make you feel better about people not making it to the end, a friend of mine who's a real Dante scholar, not a cigar salesman who likes the poem, but an actual Dante scholar, Catherine Illingworth, she said, you know, even if you look at medieval manuscripts, there are all these little notes in the margins

of Inferno 1 through 5 through 10, and then purgatory, they're fewer. And then, you know, it's a handful in paradise. So even the medieval monks were kind of losing steam somewhere along the line. So if you want to read it, though, one of the clearest takeaways from

The poem is, you really shouldn't go it alone. You really can't do education alone. You have to, yeah, you need your Virgil. And then you need your Beatrice. And then you need your Bernard of Clairvaux, who's the guide at the very end, who people always kind of forget about. But, you know, education is mediated by real people. And really all of the cosmos is. And your path to salvation will be too, mediated by people.

the God who becomes man and by the sacraments of the institutes and the priesthood of the institutes and, you know, real life. So that's true really of all education, I think. And there are wonderful resources available. Coincidentally, I only really took one course on Dante.

by one of the great scholars, Giuseppe Mazzotta, who I probably stole half of his ideas in this lecture. He has an excellent book on it, Dante, Poet of the Desert, History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy. And when I studied with him in Italy, and so we did the poem in Italian, the subsequent semester, he taught it in English at Yale, and it was being filmed for Yale Open Courses.

And it's still on YouTube, actually, from almost the exact time I took the course. And it's really good. So what I would recommend is if you want to dive into it, first, get yourself an edition with really good notes and a good translation. The Durling-Martinez, I think, is pretty good for that. And the notes are outstanding. I disagreed and changed some of their translation in the talk, but the notes are really good. Then I would get a little secondary scholarship.

Usually I say go straight to the sources. Don't get the secondary scholarship. With Dante, you need a little bit of secondary scholarship. And I would watch some lectures. I would follow a course on it if you can because you ain't making it to paradise, the real one or the canticle, on your own is my advice. Well, thank you so much, Michael. We are going to... You can clap. Go ahead.