Pierre Bouretz is a philosopher, director of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences. He published
On Dante
(Gallimard, coll. “NRF essays”, 2023).
LE FIGARO. - In your book,
On Dante
, you look at Dante's political thought which has received little attention.
Why has this remained “a blind spot in political thought” according to you?
Pierre BOURETZ. -
I explain it by the fact that Dante's political treatise,
De Monarchia
, is a book which seems late in its time and not yet likely to shed light on modernity.
In any case, these are the commonplaces about him.
It is in a blind spot in the histories of political thought.
Those who rediscovered medieval expressions of it, like Leo Strauss and his students, were mainly concerned with earlier Arab Muslim or Christian philosophy.
The greatest specialists in the prefigurations of modern political thought, such as Quentin Skinner, are interested in the following generations: those of civic humanism, around the writings of Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni and other authors who occupied political functions in Florence.
Another explanation lies in the fact that
De Monarchia
is a difficult, Aristotelian treatise, written in Latin, and of which Dante specialists themselves, focused on the
Divine Comedy
and the entire poetic corpus, do not always see the 'interest.
Ernst Kantorowicz had nevertheless spotted some brilliant ideas there, starting with that of “optimus homo”, a sort of abstract universal man, who overlooks the two figures of the emperor and the pope.
It is an almost hypermodern idea in a book that is nevertheless very anchored in the theories of the time, which is particularly interested in what should prevail between temporal power and spiritual power.
Dante's thesis on this subject was received as very hostile to the power of the popes.
It is for this reason that the Protestant tradition greatly loved
De Monarchia
, even though it was placed on the Index by the Catholic Church.
What are the contours of the idea of universal humanity formulated by Dante? How is it linked to his defense of the Empire against the republicanism of the Italian communes?
Dante did not deny himself.
He was first a Florentine republican committed to life and death, his experience ending in a sentence of exile.
But while he had fiercely defended the model of republican civic life, we found him around ten years later in the imperial camp.
What happened ?
Did he pass with weapons and baggage from one camp to another?
I do not think so.
It was rather an intellectual journey that led him towards a defense of the imperial idea.
He first thought that the scale of the good political community, that in which man's freedom can be assured, was the city, with its institutions more or less inspired by Roman republicanism.
Little by little, Dante felt that this space was too narrow, and we find in
De Monarchia
a reasoning entirely built on the idea of universal humanity.
To use the political vocabulary of his time, we cannot say that he became a Ghibelline supporter of the Empire through denial.
Rather by broadening his political thinking.
The evolution of his thinking is undoubtedly also due to the lesson he learned from his experience, to the violence of the combats in which he had witnessed and participated.
His project was to choose a language with which he could offer to a large number of people this
"gracious light of reason"
, in order to make them a nobility of spirit which he opposed to nobility of dress, of heredity and wealth.
Pierre Bouretz
Dante was very involved in the political life of his time until his exile from Florence. Is it this attitude of an enlightened scholar engaged in the affairs of the city that pushes you to place him in the “Enlightenment of the Middle Ages”? Or more the main features of his universalist philosophy?
Dante truly appears as a promoter of Enlightenment in his
Symposium
.
It is a philosophical treatise that he wrote in Italian, and not in Latin which was the language of the philosophers of his time, with the idea that the so-called vulgar language would allow him to address a large audience, composed
“not only of men, but of women”
, as he himself writes.
He wanted to share the
“bread of angels”
, that is to say the intellectual nourishment which would allow his readers to constitute a nobility of spirit.
Well before the Enlightenment, but after Maimonides, whom I had tried to show was already offering Enlightenment in the Middle Ages, we find in him the project of spreading what he calls
“the graceful light of reason”
.
Nobility must be a matter of intellectual and moral qualities rather than heredity and wealth, according to Dante. How revolutionary was this idea for its time? How did he “contribute to bringing about the aristocracy of the spirit he desired,” as you write?
Dante understood the performativity of language, that is, the fact that we can produce effects in the real world with words.
His project was to choose a language with which he could offer to a large number of people this
"gracious light of reason"
, in order to make them a nobility of spirit which he opposed to nobility of dress, of heredity and wealth.
Did he achieve this end?
In the short term his project failed: the following generations, during the Renaissance, continued to write Latin, and it was still a small elite of scholars living around enlightened princes, the most famous of whom were the Medici in Florence .
His program did not convince his time.
Petrarch, a generation later, will reproach Dante for having written the
Divine Comedy
in vulgar language.
The men of the Renaissance did not have the project of educating the greatest number of their fellow citizens in the truth of reason.
They remained Latinist and elitist.
And we will have to wait much longer for the idea of spreading Enlightenment for all to return to the agenda.
You recall how Dante's contemporaries are present in the
Divine Comedy
.
How can we explain that this did not “discredit” his work and that it retained its universal scope?
This is all the complexity of the
Divine Comedy
and its extraordinary audacity!
In Dante's time, and even long after him, the afterlife is a divine order: individuals are distributed between Hell, Purgatory and Paradise due to God's judgments.
Dante's afterlife is a construction that comes from him alone.
He allows himself to pass judgments on men and women who lived before him, and even for some of his time, eminent figures among whom we find almost all the popes...
Speaking of two suns, Dante establishes equality between Church and Empire, without preeminence of one over the other.
Its construction is foreign to that of Augustinianism and restricts the power of the Church.
Pierre Bouretz
So that it doesn't show too much, he does it within the framework of a poetic fiction.
He can therefore allow himself to say things that were impossible to express openly.
If he had written
"I think Pope Innocent VIII should be condemned to Hell"
, the text would have been burned.
But the
Comedy
was not put on the Index by the Church for an additional reason: because commentators who had well understood how explosive the book was invented an allegorical interpretation of it.
They defended the idea that the characters represented something other than themselves, primarily reason in the case of Virgil and faith in the case of Beatrice.
This allows them to say that when Dante places Innocent VIII in Hell, he does not really consider him guilty of terrible things.
So that is exactly what he thinks.
When Dante installs in Purgatory the candidates for the Empire whose restoration he hoped for, it is a way of showing his dismay, and of deploring that they did not complete their undertakings.
He expresses political, intellectual and personal judgments.
And the first commentators, starting with his two sons, took many precautions to protect him from the consequences of his writings.
For Dante, one can devote oneself to study “without hiding in solitude and idleness.” Although he never wanted to cut himself off from the affairs of the century, he wrote his masterpiece after leaving business. Did he succeed in combining investment in the city and work as a writer?
I do not believe that Dante combined commitment to civic life and the writing of a literary work;
rather, he practiced them successively.
He would never have written the
Comedy
if he had not felt freed from his civic obligations after the failure of the imperial enterprise.
It took incredible energy and extraordinary inner tension to write this book.
Dante thought, like Cicero, that the good life was the contemplative life.
But like him, he considered that a good citizen had the duty to give time to the life of the city.
During the two periods in which Dante was involved in political life, first in Florence and then as a "committed spectator" - to use the phrase attributed to Raymond Aron - of the imperial enterprise, he dedicated the essential of his time for active life.
It was only when he felt that he no longer had any control over politics that he granted himself the freedom to devote himself exclusively to writing his poem.
Also read: Stéphane Ratti: “Saint Augustine, the antidote to post-truth”
How is his vision of the “two suns”, the Empire and the Papacy, so different from the earthly city and the heavenly city of Saint Augustine?
Generally speaking, Dante is not Augustinian, unlike Petrarch for example.
For Augustine, the earthly city only matters to the extent that it can contribute to the advent of the heavenly city.
The
Divine Comedy
is a poem of the earthly world;
Dante is not concerned with the
civitas dei
.
His
De Monarchia
is a political treatise, in which the question of the relationship between the pope and the emperor is represented by the image of the
“two suns”
of Rome.
A theological interpretation of the beginning of Genesis defended by the Church asserted that of the two "luminaries" created by God, the sun was superior to the moon, the first being identified with spiritual power, and the second with temporal power.
Dante breaks this interpretation.
Speaking of two suns, he sets up an equality, without preeminence of one over the other.
In his eyes, they must share the building of consciences for one, the organization of power for the other.
Its construction is foreign to that of Augustinianism and restricts the power of the Church.
Having become a national monument, it was the symbol of the late unification of Italy and everyone tried to make it their own.
Even today, it is the cement of Italian culture.
Pierre Bouretz
Can we find traces of Dante's political thought today or is it confined to the Middle Ages and early modern times? We regularly hear in Italy that Dante is "right-wing", or on the contrary "left-wing"... Is that completely irrelevant?
This is of course irrelevant if we consider the seven centuries that separate us from Dante's death, celebrated two years ago.
During these seven centuries, Dante was partly eclipsed in the Christian world.
De
Monarchia
was placed in the Index by the Church until the end of the 19th century.
The
Divine Comedy
was not integrated into Catholic culture.
On the other hand, there existed during the same time a cult of Dante in the Protestant and Puritan world, because he was read as an anti-Papist author and favorable to the Empire.
There were therefore two very different journeys through the centuries in the Latin Catholic world, French and Italian, and in the Anglo-Saxon world.
When we get closer to the present, there are people on the extreme left who have placed Dante in their camp, Gramsci for example – even if we find pages of great subtlety about him in his work.
Italian fascism also tried to annex Dante for its own benefit.
Having become a national monument, it was the symbol of the late unification of Italy and everyone tried to make it their own.
Even today, it is the cement of Italian culture,
Comedy
being studied for three years in high school.
We have no equivalent in France.
It would be a bit of an exaggeration to say that Dante single-handedly invented the Italian language.
But that of
Comedy
was radically modern in its time.
Dante uses that of the men and women of his time: the language of parents speaking with their children;
the language of the people;
a language of great refinement, but also sometimes trivial.
This is why, in my eyes, a good translation of the
Comedy
must restore this linguistic modernity with today's language, as Jacqueline Risset in particular does.
Other things are extraordinarily “modern” in Dante, such as the already mentioned idea of an
optimus homo,
symbol of universal humanity.
Finally, and inasmuch as it was already beyond its time, its great poetic fiction is timeless.
It is the characteristic of works of genius to be eternally current.
On Dante
, by Pierre Bouretz, 290 p., 20 euros.
Gallimard