FATHER OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Also see my entry The Greatest Italian… Nationalist in the Sonnets section. The title of this entry should be self-explanatory. This is how Dante is known in his native Italy.

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There is an interesting question, particularly easy to come to the mind of a Russian Intelligent: How much can a literary genius be called a philosopher, perhaps not in that strictly professional sense, in which their lofty breed understands their common trade, but in the general sense of philosophizing for wisdom’s sake, raising good questions about good and evil, right and wrong, Warum? (to be or not to be?), and such.

In the pursuit of an adequate answer we can always point to Shakespeare and Goethe, Pushkin and Lermontov, Ibsen and Dostoyevsky, all of whom are genuine philosophizers. (On the other hand, Plato and Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, although also masters of the literary expression, are deliberately philosophy-oriented, whereas with the former set, their intellectuality is an offshoot of the belles-lettres.)

There is, however, a serious distinction between two types of philosophizing literati: those who are original thinkers, and those who are derivative thinkers. This distinction is necessary, when we come to measure up one of the greatest colossi of world literature: Dante Alighieri.

It is well known that his Commedia is saturated with philosophical content. Even his romantic confession, Vita Nuova, has an infusion of philosophizing. On the other hand, his works Convivio and De Monarchia are deliberately philosophical exercises, the former dealing with a broad range of philosophical issues, the latter, primarily with the questions of political philosophy. Bertrand Russell judges Dante’s philosophy as hopelessly derivative and even backward.---

“Although as a poet he was a great innovator, as a thinker he was somewhat behind the times. His book De Monarchia is Ghibelline in outlook, and would have been more timely a hundred years earlier. He regards Emperor and Pope as independent, and both divinely appointed. Dante’s thought is interesting, not only in itself, but as that of a layman; but it was not influential, and was hopelessly out of date.”

In his thinking, Dante was deeply influenced by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (plus by Boethius, Albertus Magnus, and via Neo-Platonism by Plato). The first two were the safest combination to be influenced by, as the teachings of Aquinas, and his endorsement of “Aristotelity” had been whole-heartedly sanctioned by the Catholic Church, with Aquinas hot on the short waiting list for canonization at the time. One could say that Dante was betting on the right horse, but on second thought, this sounds too rude.

In fact, I am earnestly curious why this literary revolutionary, this titan of original creative thinking, could be so pitiably reduced to a derivative philosophy and second-hand theology, why in his philosophical writings he never dared to break the molds, like he had so brilliantly done in his fiction?

My answer is contained in the well-known historical designation of the millennium that was soon to come to a close, with the advent of the Renaissance, namely, the Dark Ages. I believe that in Dante’s time there was so much daring already in the mere interest in philosophy that the dividing line between the original and the derivative was virtually non-existent. Let us not forget that even the greatest European philosophers of the Middle Ages were mostly derivative, only occasionally exhibiting flashes of originality; that even Thomas Aquinas was himself demonstrably derivative from Aristotle, his only claim to originality being his clever adaptation of Aristotle’s ideas to the official Christian theology, pre-approved by the Church.

In this climate of stigmatized originality, and even innocent philosophizing perfunctorily synonymous with heresy, Dante’s dangerous interest in philosophy must be seen as highly commendable on its own merit. A precocious child prodigy, even the young Mozart, in this sense, is always mostly derivative, at the dawn of his life of genius. Dante represents the newborn child Renaissance, and thence his natural limitations. Let us keep in mind that Shakespeare and Goethe, Pushkin and Lermontov, Ibsen and Dostoyevsky, all mentioned above, all belonged to an entirely different era, where, all contemporary flaws, sores, and ailments notwithstanding, philosophical thinking was no longer punishable with an everlasting hellfire.