Dante as Reformer

Abstract

Dante was a reformer: he wanted his world to have a fresh moral, religious, and political start. His severe denunciations of the individuals and institutions of his day were expressed in the hope that once the causes of the world's problems were recognized, the way would be prepared for their solution. The ideals which he offered in contrast gave positive, tangible form to his reform thought. Dante's idea of reform, as it is presented in this dissertation, is the process by which man, individually and collectively, leaves a state of misery and moves toward earthly and heavenly beatitude. In the poet's view, this state of misery is the result of the individual and social effects of cupiditas, or cupidity. Reform, therefore, must begin with the eradication of cupiditas and its daughter sins; but it is also the positive steps which man takes in order to achieve temporal happiness and eternal salvation. For the individual man, reform involves the rejection of sin and the acceptance of a life of virtue according to the precepts of philosophy and religion. On the social and political level, Dante tenders the hope that philosophy will help to cure the political abuses of his day and to create a world in which men may attain blessedness in this life through political association in the city-states, the kingdoms, and the Empire. This earthly beatitude consists in the enjoyment of peace and justice, admitting the full achievement of the human potential. On the ecclesiastical level, his idea of reform includes the hope that the Church will turn away from the wealth and luxury of its contemporary hierarchy and return to the poverty and simplicity of the primitive Church exemplified by Christ himself, by the Virgin Mary, by the Church of the Apostles, and by such later religious reformers as St. Benedict, St. Peter Damian, St. Bernard, St. Francis, and St. Dominic. Only by offering convincing evidence that many clerics were achieving beatitude could the Church fulfill its function of helping all Christians to attain eternal salvation. This kind of internal reform of individuals and institutions, in Dante's view, could not fully be accomplished without the external aid of the world's two guides, the Emperor and the Pope. But the fact that their spheres of jurisdiction had been in conflict ever since the Donation of Constantine acted as a serious deterrent to the functions of both the Emperor and the Pope in promoting reform. Only by considering the Donation in its proper light as a patrimony and not a possession could the papacy relinquish its political and proprietary claims to the temporal world, return to the virtue of the early Church, and exercise its proper duty of guiding man to heavenly beatitude. Only then would the Emperor, as owner of all temporal things, fulfill his proper function in helping man attain blessedness in this life by being restored to his position as controller and director of the world's political affairs and the bridle to human greed. Dante expected a new, reformed age of world history, the last age, in which individual and institutional reform would bring about a better moral, religious, and political life for the world to come.