THE GREATEST ITALIAN… NATIONALIST

Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe are generally acclaimed as the three greatest literary geniuses of Western Civilization, and, rather than engaging myself in a useless argument as to who else should join them at the peak, I might just take this as an attestation to their sublime achievement, and cheerfully move on to more important things about Dante, who is the subject of this entry. Its title The Greatest Italian Nationalist is a tribute to the fact that Dante’s La Divina Commedia was written in Italian, and not in Latin, thus snubbing the Catholic (in the literal sense of this word!) internationalism, in favor of the Renaissance nationalism, envisaging the nationalist Reformation.

This little note would have been shamefully inadequate, of course, had this been the only entry devoted to the genius of Dante. Fortunately, he is duly included among my magnificent shadows, but in the section of Significant Others, for the purely technical reason that there is one single entry (so far) for him there. The title of that entry is Nessun Maggior Dolore, taken from one of his most profound practical observations that “nessun maggior dolore, che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria.”

As for the above-mentioned Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe trio, I am amused to find them all reunited in this one sentence from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (Zarathustra, 6):

“That a Goethe, a Shakespeare, would be unable to breathe even for a moment in this tremendous passion and height, that Dante is, compared to Zarathustra, merely a believer, and not one who first creates truth, a world-governing spirit, a destiny… that is the least thing and gives no idea of the distance, of the azure solitude, in which this work lives.”