Dante’s Dream – Political Views of an Exiled Poet

The proper functioning of the empire on earth depends not only on its relations with individual cities and kingdoms, but also on its relations with the papacy. The jurisdictional dispute between secular and ecclesiastical authority permeates the Comedy. He deals with it directly in Marco Lombardo's discourse on the two suns and in the various attacks on the Donation of Constantine, and indirectly in his own frequent and clear denial of any but a spiritual function to the church and in his unrelenting criticism of the greed, corruption, and abuse of their position by individual popes and the clergy.

In De Monarchia, Dante deals with the questions theoretically; in the Comedy, he confronts them more practically. Greed for power and money is the dominant trait of the churchmen in the Comedy. The nature of the church is its form, and its form is the life of Christ, sacrifice, teaching, good example, a life which in the Comedy is avoided by all but the early popes and martyrs and a handful of later reforming saints, all men who shunned worldly power and possession.

Dante is led to Eden by Virgil, the poet of empire, who glorifies the Empire's meaning and history, and to heaven by Beatrice, the figure of theology, the faith on which the church is based. Both Dante's guides are surrogates for the malfunctioning organs of empire and church which they represent, and which Dante comes to represent when he is crowned in the Earthly Paradise.

The major moral obstacle to achieving the perfect state is greed for wealth and power; the major political obstacle is the papacy. The church interfered in local and international politics and asserted its right to do so on the basis of Scripture and canon law. Papal jurisdiction in temporal affairs was opposed by both monarchists and imperialists, but the former dominated the debates in the thirteenth century. The most interesting material and the largest volume in the church-state controversy during this period were produced by the struggle between Pope Boniface VIII and the French king Philip IV.