A Modern Philosopher and a Medieval Poet

MacIntyre's use of Dante, which he does not himself fully develop, is at first sight appealing: here is a highly influential and much-cited philosopher offering to Dante scholars a pivotal role for their medieval protagonist in modern ethical debate and practice.Footnote ⁶ MacIntyre makes two substantive claims for the potential importance of Dante for his own philosophical project: first, that Dante's Commedia shows in narrative practice what MacIntyre calls ‘the traditional version of moral enquiry’; secondly, that the narrative inclusiveness of Dante's Commedia allows for, and therefore defeats, rival and divergent versions of moral enquiry within its dominant tradition-based narrative.

MacIntyre champions Dante as ‘the philosopher par excellence of the practical life’. He claims that a modern recuperation of traditional Aristotelian moral enquiry requires some recourse to Dante.Footnote ⁷ In his view, to understand Aristotelian ethics is to understand the social context which made possible the exercise and celebration of the Aristotelian virtues. In a modernity in which such a social context has been eroded, we should read, alongside St Thomas Aquinas (as the foremost neo-Aristotelian philosopher), Dante who, through his narrative poetry, may show us what this ethical theory involves in narrative practice:

Dante exemplifies, for MacIntyre, what is missing in a modern ethical discourse ‘blind to the complementary character of narrative and theory both in moral enquiry and in the moral life itself’.Footnote ⁹

MacIntyre, however, goes further still: he contends that Dante's work and philosophical procedure may provide a non-theoretical way out of the ‘moral incommensurability’ which is the characteristic feature of contemporary ethical debate:

MacIntyre leaves this claim hanging, however, as he writes that ‘we cannot hope even to pose the question of how Dante's standard might be fruitfully applied without first elaborating an adequately full account of the Thomistic understanding of moral enquiry’.Footnote ¹¹ Let us, though, briefly consider it here. The first part of MacIntyre's claim seems, although contentious, straightforward: that Dante's master-narrative, the Commedia, includes within it rival moral theories under the aspect of rival moral narratives. It is less easy to grasp the second part of his claim. He writes that the poem does not just include these rival moral narratives (‘their stories’) within it as ‘episodes within its story’, but it tells ‘the story of the telling of their stories as such episodes’. The thrust of the claim as a whole, nonetheless, is clear. MacIntyre's idea is that the master moral narrative of Dante's poem includes within it rival moral theories (constructed as rival moral narratives). In so doing, it may be seen to ‘prevail over the others’, asserting its own superiority and claim on the reader's assent.

MacIntyre's second major claim about Dante's poem must be understood within his vision of the history of philosophy. In MacIntyre's simplified schema, the contemporary melange and heterodoxy of moral claims arises out of one historical conjunction: the Enlightenment's rejection of the moral teleology intrinsic to the Aristotelian ethical tradition. In the ‘tradition’ project, whose greatest protagonist is Aristotle, virtues guide man from ‘man-as-he-happens-to-be’ to ‘man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his-telos’. The Enlightenment project, however, rationally defends virtues only in relation to ‘man-as-he-happens-to-be’. Rationalists, such as Kant, justify morality and produce the evaluative concepts of ‘rights’ in relation to the dictates of instrumental reason. Utilitarians, such as Bentham and Mill, set up a new social teleology, the happiness of the greatest number, producing the contemporary normative values of ‘utility’ and ‘equity’. But, deriving from different ethical foundations and criteria, these evaluative conclusions will always be incommensurable:

The consequence is relativism and emotivism: with no accepted ethical standard, all moral arguments are, as Nietzsche espoused, nothing but (more or less concealed) expressions of individual preference.

Denying to traditional reason an ontological privilege, MacIntyre seeks nevertheless to steer moral debate out of relativism and to advocate ‘traditional’ ethics through his emphasis on narrative form and on sociological praxis. MacIntyre is surely correct to demand that a moral philosopher account for the practical manifestation of an ethical theory. As ethics is a practical subject, in the sense that it manifests itself in human actions, so a moral theory must be more than a series of propositions – it must be ‘true to life’.Footnote ¹³ As Martha Nussbaum's parallel literary defence of broadly Aristotelian ethics highlights, if a moral theory cannot be conceived in the particular of human lives (and thus shown in historical or fictional narratives) how may it be justified as a human moral theory at all?Footnote ¹⁴ MacIntyre is similarly right to emphasise the importance, in Aristotelian ethics, of a well-governed social context and normative social roles for the efficacious schooling in and flourishing of virtue.

MacIntyre's exaggerated emphases on narrative and sociology, however, lead to major problems in any comparative analysis with Dante. MacIntyre relativises historically the Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophy he avowedly champions into an ever-evolving tradition in which rival ethical views may be, more or less successfully, accommodated over time.Footnote ¹⁵ MacIntyre's analysis of the papal encyclicals Veritatis Splendor (1992) and Fides et Ratio (1998) is symptomatic of his procedural insistence on the relativisation of natural reason within a particular moral community.Footnote ¹⁶ Although it is true that, in his later works, MacIntyre retracts his earlier repudiation of ‘metaphysical biology’, even his more recent work insists on a vindication of traditional ethics in terms of a comparative critique of rival theories.Footnote ¹⁷ Drawing upon the empirical evidence of professional and lay intractable disagreement in ethics, MacIntyre does not consider sustainable the view that the precepts of natural law might be rationally binding in the same way as, for example, proofs in mathematics such that only ignorance would lead to error.Footnote ¹⁸ MacIntyre's standpoint is, nonetheless, alien to Dante for whom a correct understanding of human nature, a universal and timeless criterion, ontologically justifies moral values. As Dante's eulogy of the pagan philosophers suggests, the most important claim of traditional philosophy is that it is semper eadem, for all men and for all times. With regard to Aristotelian ethics, Dante exclaims: ‘Qui ab Aristotile felicitatem ostensam reostendere conaretur?’Footnote ¹⁹ The suggestion, then, that the task of each generation of philosophers is to remould an ethical theory such that it takes into account rival theories in an ever-evolving tradition would not, I think, have occurred to him.

Beyond this narrative-genealogical bias, MacIntyre tends to imply that social context is not just a conduit for, but the origin of, moral value in se. MacIntyre presents the ‘tradition-version-of-moral-enquiry’ as arising from particular social structures and enterprises which lent evaluative value to certain human strengths and capabilities.Footnote ²⁰ For Dante, however, social organisation is optimal when it serves as an effective conduit to human nature; a deficient society, in which false values reign, subjects and inhibits the natural potential of its citizens. Where MacIntyre characteristically proceeds, at the level of rhetoric, to ask ‘Whose Justice? Which Rationality’, for Dante ‘rationality’ refers to a thing – an intellectual faculty that human beings possess just as they possess the sensual faculty of sight.Footnote ²¹ The word ‘rationality’ may be in need of etymological or epistemological clarification, but the thing ‘rationality’, for Dante, is ontologically grounded and does not require, as for MacIntyre, locating within a particular historical or sociological tradition.

It is difficult for MacIntyre to evade the accusation of working within the assumptions of the relativism he ostensibly attacks: MacIntyre's ‘so-described particularism, his denial that a rationally justifiable moral theory can speak to, and be persuasive for, any rational person beyond the bounds of the moral community of whose practice it is the theory’.Footnote ²² Thomas D. D'Andrea has suggested, nonetheless, that the attack on MacIntyre's relativism is ‘often enough inspired by a failure to distinguish what he says about rational moral persuasion from what he says about moral truth’.Footnote ²³ In this view, MacIntyre is not aiming for ‘moral truth’ but for an account of morality which is persuasive: the ‘appropriate goal […] for MacIntyre is to have a good measure of rational confidence that one's ethical beliefs and general moral outlook are true’.Footnote ²⁴ This displacement of ‘persuasion’ for ‘truth’, however, only reinforces the relativity of the moral position. Indeed, D'Andrea proceeds to characterise MacIntyre's ethical project by just the same historical and social contingency.Footnote ²⁵

For Dante, by contrast, there are three principal schools of philosophy – the Peripatetics, the Stoics, and the Epicureans – but his view of the ethical teaching of these schools stresses similarity rather than difference. The motives, or final goals, of the three schools may have been very different: the peripatetics placed ‘happiness’ as the highest good, the stoics ‘virtue’, the Epicureans ‘pleasure’ (understood narrowly as ataraxia, a tranquillity of the soul free from pain). And yet, for Dante, each school nonetheless – in seeking its respective goal – taught and trained its disciples in virtue defined communally, in a nutshell, as the ordering of human action in accordance with reason. There is no room for moral relativism in Dante's work because the criterion of natural ethics – reason – is not itself in question, as it is in modern ethics.

It is highly implausible, therefore, that Dante could have countenanced MacIntyre's substitute for reason, the ‘historical imagination’:

Dante's narrative does not, as MacIntyre suggests, include within it rival versions of moral enquiry. MacIntyre's sweeping pronouncement about ‘Dante's affirmative answer’ ignores, furthermore, the distinctions between natural and Christian ethics in the Commedia. The framework of the Commedia, after all, is Christian – it depicts the three realms of the Christian afterlife! Although, arguably, the moral structure of the Inferno may be understood principally in terms of natural law and the ethics of Aristotle (a reason-bound moral landscape), the Purgatory and Paradiso are emphatically revelation-bound moral landscapes. MacIntyre's recourse to the Commedia as a whole to resolve philosophical considerations, therefore, is interpretatively unsustainable.

MacIntyre's appeal to the master narrative of Dante's Commedia may suggest, nonetheless, an implicit recourse to a Christian framework as a non-philosophical way out of the relativism of his philosophical position.Footnote ²⁷ It is, therefore, revealing that MacIntyre's rhetoric is expanded by John Milbank with regard not to Dante's Commedia but to theology ‘as a metadiscourse’ and that Graham Ward, without any reference to MacIntyre, should have characterised Milbank's Theology and Social Theory as, indeed, a ‘contemporary Commedia’.Footnote ²⁸ Milbank, who ‘in contrast to most critiques of MacIntyre, [does] not find him sufficiently relativistic or historicist’, starts from MacIntyre's premise, that ‘one must place oneself within a “narrative”, or the accepted and ever-to-be-repeated “plot formation” of a particular society’.Footnote ²⁹ He then extrapolates from MacIntyre's further position – that one version of moral enquiry may prevail over another because it includes, within its master narrative, its rivals – to apply to Christianity as the true master narrative or ‘metadiscourse’. This leads to Milbank's extraordinary claim that someone might assent to his genealogy of Christianity as, simply, the best story available: a rival moral view ‘cannot be refuted, but only out-narrated, if we can persuade people – for reasons of “literary taste” – that Christianity offers a better story’.Footnote ³⁰

Dante will not play the role which MacIntyre's own philosophical-historical project assigns for him. Dante does not provide an ‘affirmative answer’, and certainly not in philosophical terms, to MacIntyre's desire for a ‘single history of the world’ which will reconcile divergent versions of philosophical enquiry. Dante's Commedia does not open a way out of what is, for MacIntyre, the philosophical incommensurability of modernity. Nor do appeals to Dante's Commedia as a model for a theological-historical ‘metanarrative’ fare any better. All this notwithstanding, there is, I would argue, another way in which Dante's Commedia presents ‘a challenge to his future readers’ and in which his poem confronts head on a philosophical view which would entirely undermine the very principle on which it is based. Moreover, this view – which Dante singles out as the heresy par excellence in his poem – is particularly striking as it underlies, arguably, a characteristic philosophical attitude of secular modernity.

A Medieval Poet and Modernity

Having passed through the circles of upper hell where incontinent sin (lust, gluttony, avarice and prodigality, anger) is punished, Dante and Virgil enter the City of Dis where malice (deliberate evil) is punished. They are immediately confronted by a huge graveyard of burning open tombs: these are, Dante learns, the tombs of the heretics of all different sects. Dante and Virgil then enter, by a secret path, that part of this burning graveyard where ‘Epicurus and his disciples who make the soul die with the body’ reside.Footnote ³¹

The presence of Epicurus and his sect is deeply surprising. Kenelm Foster asks ‘Why then Epicurus? Why the special stress, implied in the poet's deliberately choosing to cross the circle of heresy at precisely that point, on the evil of denying the soul's survival of bodily death?’Footnote ³² There were, after all, far more obvious ‘Christian’ heresies such as the denial of Christ's human or divine nature or forms of body-soul dualism (Manichaeism or Albigensianism). And yet, the whole canto of the heretics (Inferno X) is devoted to one heresy of pagan origin: the denial of the soul's survival of bodily death. Dante's emphasis on Epicureanism is certainly surprising, but it is also prophetic. Had Dante chosen to focus on, say, Arianism, his modern secular reader could have read the passage with the detached curiosity of an historian of Christianity or antiquarian. But Dante's emphasis on Epicureanism does embody, in MacIntyre's terms, ‘a challenge to his future readers’. If the great summa of Dante's poem, like the great gothic cathedrals of his time, may appear wonderful but alien (as it did to the critic I.A. Richards), does not the twenty-first-century reader nonetheless discover a strange kinship with the views of the Epicureans therein represented?Footnote ³³ For, prima facie at least, an outlook concerned only with this life is, also, a dominant feature of secular modernity. What, then, does Dante mean by Epicureanism and how might his account provide a parallel with philosophical attitudes underlying modernity?Footnote ³⁴

The first perplexing thing for a modern reader is that Dante's Epicurus is presented as a heretic at all. Surely only a baptised Christian could be a heretic?Footnote ³⁵ Authoritative theologians, such as Augustine and Aquinas, had considered that heresy may involve error with regard to the goal of life and not only errors with regard explicitly to the revealed dogmas of Christian faith.Footnote ³⁶ Nonetheless, the point was that these errors (even if pagan in origin) were held obstinately against the authority of church teaching. By classing Epicurus as a heretic, Dante seems to suggest that Epicurus trespassed against not ecclesial but philosophical authority. Thus, although Democritus held the same atomistic view of the human soul as Epicurus, he is classed by Dante not as a heretic but as a virtuous pagan.Footnote ³⁷ Epicurus is a heretic, in other words, not simply because he shared with Democritus a mistaken atomistic view of the human soul, but because he persevered in it even after Aristotle (the authority in philosophy: ‘il maestro di color che sanno’) had set forth and confuted Democritus in De Anima.Footnote ³⁸ Epicurus’ heresy involves a philosophical error and an affront to the philosophical authority of Aristotle. To deviate from Aristotle in philosophy is, for Dante it seems, a form of philosophical heresy!

It seems correct, therefore, to affirm that the followers of Epicurus in Inferno X are not ‘heretics’ in the conventional sense (as those who hold some of the truths of the Christian faith but deny others) but, rather, unbelievers who, for philosophical reasons, deny the revealed truths of faith tout court. After all, Epicurean mortalism is entirely incompatible with Christian faith and, indeed, with the literal and moral ground of the Commedia. The poem's literal subject is the state of human souls after death while, for the Epicureans, there is no afterlife. The moral subject is man who may elect good or evil in this life and will thereby be rewarded or punished by God for the eternity of the next life. The Epicurean canto, which is set in a graveyard, is clearly intended as a memento mori. Ironically, however, it was precisely the fear of death and of God's final judgement from which Epicurean philosophy sought to liberate mankind. As Edward Moore suggests, Dante refers ‘not so much to what we understand by “heresy” as to open and professed infidelity, and this particularly in its aspect of Materialism’.Footnote ³⁹

This brings us to the second thing which may surprise modern readers about Dante's Epicurus and his followers in the circle of the heretics. One might think that Epicurus is being held up by Dante as the heretic par excellence because he pursued and encouraged a life of pleasure. If Epicurus the sensual hedonist is being condemned, modern secular readers – if just reasonably abstemious – might think themselves off the hook! But this is not the case. The materialist who, unrestrained by the moral influence of religion, lives a bestial life of the senses is given a place in Dante's Inferno but he does not merit the epithet (or rather epitaph) ‘Epicurean’. Indeed Dante polemically corrects the false, but widespread, medieval view of Epicurus as little better than a pig enslaved to the senses (the porcus de grege Epicuri), a figure he caricatures in the glutton Ciacco (Inferno VI).Footnote ⁴⁰ Dante's treatment, by contrast, reflects a more sophisticated strand of the medieval reception which, although condemning Epicurus’ natural philosophy, nonetheless understood Epicurus to have taught virtue in moral philosophy.Footnote ⁴¹ The mantra ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die’ is foolish – and should not be attributed to any philosophical school – because such a life is, to use Dante's metaphors, a living death, a sleep, or an animal life. Man is, uniquely, a rational animal and, therefore, he only lives as a man insofar as he lives in accordance with reason. The Epicurean secular life – based upon a conviction of man's mortality – does not imply, therefore, depraved sensuality.

Dante uses the appellation ‘Epicurean’ to refer, in a general way, to all those who live in accordance with the teachings of moral philosophy but who, due to an intellectual conviction of mortalism, reject Christian faith.Footnote ⁴² Thus, the followers of Epicurus depicted in Inferno X, although denying Christian faith, are all ‘great-souled’ nobles (‘magnanimi’). In the context of an intellectual period during which neo-Aristotelian scholars sought to mediate between the order of nature and the order of grace, and between the patrimony of the pagan philosophers (principally of Aristotle) and the body of Christian revelation, Dante argued that man has two ethical goals which correspond to these two orders: a natural happiness potentially attainable in this life through the teachings of the philosophers, and an eternal beatitude attainable only through the teachings of the Christian faith. Dante's Epicurean thereby provides the theoretical framework for what we might call today ‘secular man’, committed to this world and the attainment of earthly felicity but unconcerned with or indifferent to religion of an afterlife.

Modern secular unbelievers, therefore, might like to seek out their distant intellectual ancestors in Dante's graveyard of the Epicureans. But they must be wary of flattering themselves by the comparison. After all, many of our secular contemporaries have rejected not only, in common with Dante's Epicureans, the immortality of the soul and the dogmas of the Christian faith but also, in contrast to the Epicureans presented in Inferno X, the ethics and philosophy which direct man towards a this-worldly happiness. It is only too easy to witness today the disordered pursuit of sensual gratification, from depraved excesses (the pig-Epicurean) to more sophisticated tastes (the modern day ‘Epicure’). This is as much a characteristic of early twenty-first-century Western society as it appears to have been a feature of early fourteenth-century Christendom. But rather less widespread, in the early twenty-first century, is the conviction, amongst secular unbelievers, that it behoves them – qua human beings – to pursue, and to exhort others to pursue, the life of virtue. For, in the era of modernity – after a philosophical cataclysm which MacIntyre crudely locates in the eighteenth-century enlightenment abandonment of Aristotelianism – reason and natural ethics are themselves in question.Footnote ⁴³

Dante's representation of the Epicureans nonetheless presents two key challenges to a modern secular reader. First, it denies him or her the opportunity to stand entirely outside the Commedia, as outside a museum of antiquities which have no bearing on modernity. Dante's emphasis on Epicureanism belies any simplistic depiction of the medieval era as an ‘age of faith’ in which, before the advent of modern science, people in Western Europe unanimously subscribed unquestionably to the tenets of the Christian faith. We may note, indeed, that many of the principal philosophical views of the Epicureans find their direct parallels in the standard tenets of dominant forms of modern thought: materialism; atomism; mortalism; implicit atheism; the rejection of all forms of religion; the denial of Creation and of Divine Providence; a version of ethics founded upon a prudential pleasure principle. Indeed, the mechanistic philosophy characteristic of the modern age presupposes, more or less self-consciously, premises shared with Epicurean teaching. Beyond an analogical parallel, scholars have even traced macro-intellectual genealogies from Aristotelian ontology to an Epicurean-inspired materialism, the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, and the intellectual landscape of modernity.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is thus of particular interest that Dante responds to this incipient materialism, mortalism, and implicit atheism at a crucial philosophical juncture in western thought, at arguably the very height of European scholasticism and medieval Christendom.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although the modern reader may have different reasons, scientific or otherwise, for holding such views, Dante's familiarity with them may challenge the unbelieving reader into a constructive dialogue with the Christian poet.

Secondly, Dante's poem presents a stringent ethical challenge to those who are convinced unbelievers. This is a challenge exemplified by a story in Boccaccio's Decameron which builds upon Dante's presentation of the Epicureans. A group of Florentine signori, given to a life of pleasure, accost the Florentine poet-philosopher Guido Cavalcanti in the graveyard of St Reparata. They ask him what he will do when, following the opinion of Epicurus, he has finally proven that God does not exist. Guido replies obliquely that the signori can say in their house whatever they like. Only the signori's leader, Betto Bruneschelli, understands Guido's meaning. The graveyard is the house of the dead and the signori, pursuing a hedonistic lifestyle, are worse than dead men. While he may not believe in a life after death, Guido – living a virtuous and philosophical life – is alive as a man before death. Whether or not they believe in life after death, these signori – living the life of the senses – are, by contrast, dead as men (rational animals) even before their death as sentient beings. The second challenge, therefore, is to live fully the ethical life of reason, whether Christian believer or not, which is the only kind of life worthy of being called human. This is the necessary criterion, alongside being an unbeliever, to join that exclusive band of proto-laici who occupy the graveyard of the Epicureans in Dante's depiction of the afterlife!

At this point, a reader might reasonably object: but, of course, not all modern readers of Dante's poem are secular non-believers. Indeed, less than a hundred years ago, on the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante's death in 1921, Pope Benedict XV could even proclaim:

Pope Benedict XV's statement undeniably reflects a tendency of his time to read Dante's Commedia as distilling the wisdom of the great age of scholasticism (as, more crudely, Aquinas in verse), a tendency which may elide the range of Dante's sources and the striking individuality of aspects of his own thinking.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is nonetheless easy to imagine how, for someone brought up within the intellectual tradition of Thomism, Dante might have ‘the freshness of a poet of our times’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Dante's emphasis, meanwhile, on the relative autonomy of philosophy and theology was appealing to a catholic culture which sought a convincing response to the opposing philosophical currents of modernity in the philosophical tradition of the scholastics (and principally in its championing of Aquinas). There is a sense in which Dante, as a poet writing at the height of medieval scholasticism, does pass on ‘the most glorious fruits of philosophical and theological teaching and thought’ and, for anyone committed to this tradition, his poem is an insightful introduction (even where certain elements of his thought deviate from what would become Roman orthodoxy in Thomism).

For Dante to have the ‘freshness of a poet of our times’, however, for Dante to present, in MacIntyre's words, ‘a challenge to his future readers’, he must also speak philosophically to those who have neither Aristotelian nor Christian commitments at all. Alongside Pope Benedict XV's championing of Dante in his anniversary year, 1921 also saw the translation into English of a new catechism of the Summa Theologiae.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the preface, Pope Benedict XV reiterates his conviction that ‘the manifold honours paid by the Holy See to St Thomas Aquinas exclude for ever any doubt from the mind of Catholics with regard to his being raised up by God as the Master of Doctrine to be followed by the Church through all ages’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Notably, in the catechism's presentation of Aquinas’ discussion of Justice and the sin of ‘irreligion’, the author adds the question: ‘Under what special form does the latter exist at the present day?’, to which he answers ‘Under the form of what may be called secularism […] that system in which God is put out of one's life completely’.Footnote ⁵¹ Today, he suggests, ‘there is no more pressing duty than to combat secularism by all the means in one's power’.Footnote ⁵² Almost a hundred years on, secularism has become ever more the attitude of ‘our times’. Although the analogue is imprecise, it seems appropriate to highlight, therefore, Dante's strange but prophetic emphasis on the Epicureans.