From Florence to the Heavenly City

The Poetry of Citizenship in Dante

Claire E. Honess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351566315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

Dante's political thought has long constituted a major area of interest for Dante studies, yet the poet's political views have traditionally been considered a self-contained area of study and viewed in isolation from the poet's other concerns. Consequently, the symbolic and poetic values which Dante attaches to political structures have been largely ignored or marginalised by Dante criticism. This omission is addressed here by Claire Honess, whose study of Dante's poetry of citizenship focuses on more fundamental issues, such as the relationship between the individual and the community, the question of what it means to be a citizen, and above all the way in which notions of cities and citizenship enter the imagery and structure of the Commedia.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction: From Florence to the Heavenly City

1. 'Di Fiorenza in popol giusto e sano'

In his letter to Can Grande della Scala, Dante Alighieri famously styles himself ‘florentinus natione non moribus’ (Ep. XIII, 1).¹ The reader of the Paradiso may perhaps be reminded of this disclaimer when, in canto XXXI, the wonder felt by the pilgrim on contemplating for the first time the Celestial Rose of the Empyrean is likened — in an extended comparison — to that of a barbarian on seeing city of Rome:

Se i barbari, venendo da tal plaga
che ciascun giorno d’Elice si cuopra,
rotante col suo figlio ond’ella è vaga,
veggendo Roma e l’ardüa sua opra,
stupefaciensi, quando Laterano
a le cose mortali andò di sopra;
ïo, che al divino da l’umano,
a l’etterno dal tempo era venuto,
e di Fiorenza in popol giusto e sano,
di che stupor dovea esser compiuto!

(Par. XXXI, 31–40)

The city of Florence is here representative of a society as far removed from that of the souls who form the Rose as the human is from the divine, the temporal from the eternal. It is not only the poet’s own city, referred to here for the last time in the poem, but also a symbol of all earthly corruption and injustice: the natural antithesis to the ‘popol giusto e sano’ of Heaven.

The ambivalence of Dante’s attitude towards his native city is so much of a commonplace as to scarcely need reiterating. On the one hand, Florence represents Dante’s ideal society and, more poignantly, his own ideal home: ‘Fiorenza mia' (Purg. VI, 127), the ‘bello ovile ov’io dormi’ agnello’ (Par. XXV, 5). Dante is always, as D’Entrèves rightly emphasized, ‘first and foremost a citizen of Florence, and Florence is the root of his knowledge of and interest in politics’.² Indeed, as a young man Dante had played an active role in the government of his city, participating in various Florentine councils from 1295 until his exile in 1301. In May 1300 he acted as Florence’s envoy to San Gimignano, between June and August of the same year he held the office of Prior, and in June 1301 he was outspoken in his opposition to the Priors’ proposal to continue supplying horsemen to serve the Pope — an action which, doubtless, helped to seal his fate in the eyes of the opposing Black Guelf faction and to render inevitable his banishment from the city.³ The poet’s love for his ‘patria’ — and his continued attachment to it — are expressed even in those of his works written after his exile. This is reflected perhaps most clearly in his continued (if disillusioned) description of himself as a citizen of Florence after that traumatic event — referring to himself in his letters as ‘Florentinus et exul inmeritus’⁴ — and is given most articulate expression in the De vulgari eloquentia:⁵

Nos autem, cui mundus est patria velut piscibus equor, [...] Sarnum biberimus ante dentes et Florentia adeo diligamus ut, quia dileximus, exilium patiamur iniuste [...]. Et quamvis ad voluptatem nostram sive nostre sensualitatis quietem in terris amenior locus quam Florentia non existat.

(D.V.E. I, vi, 3)

In contrast to such expressions of civic pride, however, Florence may also be — in the eyes of its famous son — the most degenerate of human cities, so wicked identified as the city of Lucifer himself:

La tua città [...] di colui è pianta
che pria volse le spalle al suo fattore
e di cui è l’invidia tanto pianta.

(Par. IX, 127–29)

It is vilified in the harshest terms, not only throughout the Commedia,⁶ but also in the poet’s other writings of the post-1301 period. The bitterness of exile is a constant theme, from the ‘canzone of exile’, ‘Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute’, through the Convivio — where Florence is portrayed as having reduced Dante to the status of a pilgrim or almost a beggar (Conv. I, iii, 4) — and the De vulgari eloquentia — where even in the poet’s examples of different types of sentence construction his city and its problems figure highly.⁷ It is in the letters of this period, however, that Florence is treated, perhaps, most harshly by Dante. In the letter to the ‘scelestissimis Florentinis intrinsecis’ (Ep. VI), the Florentines are attacked as ‘alteri Babilonii’ (Ep. VI, 8) and as ‘miserrima Fesulanorum propago, et iterum iam punita barbaries' (Ep. VI, (24); and in that to Henry VII (Ep. VII) the city’s opposition to the Empire is described in the most vehement of terms:

An ignoras, excellentissime principum, nec de specula summe celsitudinis deprehendis ubi vulpecula fetoris istius, venantium secura, recumbat? Quippe nec Pado precipiti, nec Tiberi tuo criminosa potatur, verum Sarni fluenta torrentis adhuc rictus eius inficiunt, et Florentia, forte nescis?, dira hec pernicies nuncupatur. Hec est vipera versa in viscera genitricis; hec est languida pecus gregem domini sui sua contagione commaculans; hec Myrrha scelestis et impia in Cinyre patris amplexus exestuans; hec Amata illa impatiens, que, repulso fatali connubio, quem fata negabant generum sibi adscire non timuit, sed in bella furialiter provocavit, et demum, male ausa luendo, laqueo se suspendit. Vere matrem viperea feritate dilaniare contendit, dum contra Romam cornua rebellionis exacuit, que ad ymaginem suam atque similitudinem fecit illam.

(Ep. VII, (23–25)

2. Dante, Poet of the City

Contradictory as Dante’s attitude towards his native city may be, it is nonetheless clear that being a citizen of Florence is of central importance to the poet, both in his life and in his works. Not only does ‘the municipal spirit pervade the whole of Dante’s work’, as D’Entrèves notes (p. 11); it is also true to say that Dante himself 'è radicalmente “animale cittadino”, che della e nella vita cittadina vive la sua esperienza, consuma il suo destino’.⁸ He is not just a Florentine, but also — more fundamentally and perhaps more importantly — a citizen tout court. This is nowhere clearer than in the famous exchange with Charles Martel in the Heaven of Venus. ‘Or dí’, Charles' soul bids Dante’s pilgrim, ‘sarebbe il peggio / per l’omo in terra, se non fosse cive?'; and the pilgrim replies, without the slightest hesitation: ‘Sí [...] e qui ragion non cheggio’ (Par. VIII, 115–17). For the poet, as for Aristotle, human beings are — in the most literal sense — ‘political’ animals, capable of, and designed for, life in a polis or city-state;⁹ and the city, ‘cuius finis est bene sufficienterque vivere’ (Mon. I, v, 7), is thus seen as the natural and proper seat of human society.

Yet cities are not, for Dante, exclusively ‘human’, and neither is his interest in them primarily ‘political’. If Florence — and his own experience as a Florentine — lies at the heart of the poet’s interest in cities and his espousal of civic values, then the most perfect expression of this interest and of these values is to be found in the 'popol giusto e sano’ of the city of God in Heaven. It is no coincidence that the force behind Dante’s comparison in Paradiso XXXI, 39 derives less from the simple juxtaposition of Florence and the Empyrean than from the fact that two diametrically opposed cities — or, more precisely, communities — are here set one against the other.¹⁰ The experience of having been a citizen on earth becomes, that is, a determining factor not only in the poet’s consideration of all other forms of human political organization, but also in his conception of the eschatological world dealt with in the Commedia. Just as Florence and other cities like her — from ancient Thebes or Athens to contemporary Pisa or Lucca — are omnipresent in Dante’s works, so too are other — less substantial — cities: from the Convivio's ‘cittade del bene vivere’ (Conv. IV, xxiv 11), to the gate leading to the ‘città dolente’ of (Inf. III, 1), and from the city of Dis, to the equally ‘civic’ gate dividing Ante-Purgatory from Purgatory proper, and finally to the apotheosis of the celestial city in the Empyrean (Par. XXX, 130).¹¹ It is my view that Dante’s own experiences of life in a city and of being a citizen play a key role in many aspects of his development — as an individual, as a political thinker, as a Christian, and, above all, as a poet — and my book will seek to examine the role and function of the notion of the city in Dante’s works, focusing most closely on the ways in which the poet’s multifaceted interest in and utilization of the city receive their fullest expression in the Commedia.

3. The City in Dante Criticism

Dante’s political thought has long constituted a major area of interest for Dante critics.¹² The importance of the notion of the city to the poet, however, has tended to be both taken for granted and ignored. Whilst most commentators agree that Dante’s involvement in Florentine communal government constitutes an important element of his political formation, few have examined the concept of the city-state in any depth. Indeed, the city is most frequently seen as having significance only insofar as it forms the practical springboard for Dante’s later political theory. As a result, consideration of its role has been effectively ‘engulfed’ by discussion of more contentious issues and, above all, by the question of Empire.¹³ In addition, the city has also been treated as virtually indistinguishable from the kingdom — both being smaller political units, ideally falling under the jurisdiction of the Empire.¹⁴ Dante has even been seen as rejecting, in exile, ‘not only Florence and its politics, but the whole idea of the city as the proper and natural form of political association’.¹⁵

Those studies which have been conducted on the relationship between Dante and the city have tended to focus in a rather narrow way on the poet’s biographical links with particular contemporary cities, and on the attitudes which he expresses towards them. As well as the many studies of Florence and Rome and accounts which deal as a group with the cities referred to or visited by Dante,¹⁶ critical, attention has also been directed towards Bologna,¹⁷ the Tuscan cities,¹⁸ the cities of the Veneto and of the poet’s exile,¹⁹ and many others.²⁰

The city of Rome — by virtue of its unique position, both within medieval Christian society and in Dante’s thought — must necessarily be considered apart from the other cities of the poet’s day. For Dante, ‘Rome’ comes to signify not only the city itself, but also any one of the institutions with which the city was inextricably bound up: the great classical Roman Empire, the new Christian Empire which the poet hoped to see restored, the Church and the Papacy, the putative ‘kingdom’ of Italy.²¹ As Charles Davis has pointed out, the populus romanus is, in Dante’s eyes, ‘an association of wills rather than of blood [...]. It is limited by no city walls or national boundaries [...]; for Dante, those Italians who resist Rome are barbarians and those foreigners who serve Rome are Romans’.²² It is clear, therefore, that, as a city, Rome is utterly atypical. The multifaceted political connotations which Rome evokes mean that it cannot be taken as representative of any civic type or ideal. Its centrality, not only to Dante’s political thought, but also to many other aspects of his writing, means that it has been the subject of numerous studies.²³ Yet these reflect the poet’s own preoccupations, and treat Rome as the seat of the Empire, of the Church, of the glories of the classical past, of Dante’s political hopes for the future, but rarely — if at all — as a city.²⁴

It is the city o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: From Florence to the Heavenly City
• 2. Insiders and Outsiders in the Commedia
• 3. The Ideal of Citizenship
• 4. City, Garden, Wilderness: The Commedia's Outsiders
• 5. The City of Jerusalem in the Commedia
• 6. The Comic and the Civic
• 7. Conclusion: The Poetry of Citizenship in Dante
• Bibliography
• Index