How did Dante (1265–1321), who saw himself as an orthodox Christian, look upon other religious, cultural or ethnic communities both inside and outside his own medieval Europe, and more in particular Jews and Muslims? First, I turn to the reasons why this question has repeatedly been raised in Dante studies. Second, I discuss the issue in relation to Dante’s political theory of world government as explained in his political treatise, On Monarchy, and his cosmological vision of divine order as unfolded in his epic, the Divine Comedy. My contention is that religion, culture and ethnicity are modern markers that do not easily apply to Dante’s worldview because, like many Christians well into the early modern era, Dante believed in the unity of the human race as descended from Adam and Eve. In this view, the three religious cultures of medieval Europe – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – were but variants of one culture. One of these was right by divine grace and predestination. The remaining two were in error because of human ignorance and the wrong application of free will. Dante upheld this narrow view of cultural and religious differences because the limits of his existential horizon prevented him from grasping the cultural complexity and diversity that modern historians have increasingly insisted upon with regard to the medieval period, counter to the earlier claim – although in the popular view still widely held – that the middle ages were dark, cruel and simple-minded. In effect, in his ambitious undertaking to formulate a political theory that embraces all nations and peoples, and to present a vision of redemption that encompasses the entire cosmos, Dante is an example of how the narrow perspectives of individual medieval Christians could yet generate worldviews that embody the full complexity of the medieval period.
Dante’s attitude towards Jews
The first reason why the question as to Dante’s attitude toward Jews and Muslims has been so hotly debated in Dante studies relates to Dante’s biography. In the nineteenth century it was suggested that Dante had a personal friend in the Jewish poet Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome (also known as Manoello Giudeo) who exchanged poems with Dante’s poet-friend Cino da Pistoia, and who shortly after Dante’s death wrote, in Hebrew, an imitation of the Comedy called ‘Tophet and Eden,’ which contains a vision of Hell and Heaven.Reference Roth1 However, early in the 20th century the suggestion of a bond of friendship between Dante and Immanuel was dismissed for lack of evidence.Reference Cassuto2 It is more likely that Immanuel simply was a skilled poet, familiar with Dante’s poetic vision of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. There is no evidence that, on a personal level, Dante was particularly concerned with the Jewish communities. Their members were often well educated, men as well as women, and Jewish men regularly occupied high positions at various courts.Reference Moore3 However, although the largest in Southern Europe, the Jewish communities in Dante’s Italy were still very small, and they were commonly confined to specific areas within larger cities. Dante named the lowest spot in Hell, where Satan, in the form of a gigantic three-headed beast with six broken wings and three mouths, devours the three arch-traitors of mankind (Brutus, Cassius and Judas) ‘Giudecca’, and this eventually became the name for the Jewish ghetto in Venice. But as the arch-traitors are two Romans who killed the first Roman emperor, Julius Cesar, and a Jew who betrayed the son of God, Dante’s Giudecca is not the Jewish ghetto in Hell. The image of Satan’s carnal feast at the bottom of the Inferno is an inverted image of the Holy Trinity that spells out Dante’s firm belief in the universal righteousness of both the Christian church and the Roman Empire, not in its republican form, but as a monarchical institution.
Dante shows no signs of tolerance towards the Jews in the Comedy. In the second heaven of Paradiso, for example, it is said that, although the Jews carried out the will of God in crucifying Christ, Emperor Titus’s destruction of Jerusalem was a just revenge for their evil motives (Par. 7: 46–51). Still, the condemnation of Jewry is not a central theme in the Comedy. On the contrary, Dante constantly focuses on internal Christian conflicts, and this throughout the Christian era. Dante does not blame the Jews or the Muslims for the general disorder of Christianity. Rather he picks on Pope Bonifacius VIII (1294–1303), of whom he says that this ‘Prince of the New Pharisees chose to wage war upon the Lateran instead of fighting Saracens and Jews’ (Inf. 27: 85–87).4 Dante basically holds that the Jewish problem, along with the Muslim one, will go unsolved as long as the Christian world is torn apart by wars and hideous strife between popes, emperors and kings, and between the pro-papal party of the Guelphs and the pro-imperial party of the Ghibellines and their various supporting factions within the Italian city-states.
Dante and Arab philosophy
The second reason why scholars have been so concerned with Dante’s attitude towards Jews and Muslims focuses upon his philosophy. Dante was familiar with Jewish and Muslim commentaries and treatises on ancient philosophical texts, the Latin translations of some of which were either based on or influenced by Arabic translations. Dante scholars have tried to pinpoint any direct or indirect absorption of Jewish and Muslim thought in Dante’s texts. The most pressing point concerns Dante’s relation to the so-called radical Aristotelianism, which was condemned by the Parisian bishop Etienne Tempiere in 1270 and 1277. Aristotelianism relied on the commentaries of the Muslim philosopher Averroes’s (or Ibn Rushd’s) on Aristotle, and this was incompatible with the teachings of the church.Reference Dales5 The condemnation led to the downfall of two teachers of Aristotelian philosophy at the university of Paris, Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, who were believed to have argued that the world was without beginning and end when considered from a philosophical point of view.
In the Comedy, Siger is set up as a blessed soul in the heaven of the Sun, along with Thomas Aquinas and other Christian thinkers. Some scholars consider Boethius of Dacia a possible source for some of Dante’s early philosophical views. Odysseus’ last journey in canto 26 of Inferno, for instance, has been interpreted as an implicit renunciation of any previous inclination towards Averroism Dante may have had.6 The story describes how Odysseus with a small crew of faithful companions sails beyond the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar and into the vast ocean of the Southern Hemisphere. After a long time at sea he finally catches a glimpse of Mount Purgatory, but then the ship is wrecked and everyone drowns. This story of Odysseus’s mad voyage towards self-destruction is pure invention on Dante’s part. It has often been interpreted as a warning to human beings not to try and conquer, physically and mentally, what is beyond their power and comprehension. In the beginning of Purgatorio, it is said that human beings should be satisfied with the ‘because unexplained’ (Purg. 3: 37).
The thesis that the Odysseus tale contains an implicit reference to the philosophical errors of Averroism is not easy to substantiate. It tends to neglect, for example, that the Odysseus canto is thematically concerned with what happens when selfishness destroys family bonds and drives an individual to excessive action. Moreover, the thesis is not consistent with Dante’s placement of Averroes in the first circle of Hell (Limbo) with Aristotle and Plato. Although formally a part of Hell, Limbo is in some sense outside the domain of evil. Finally, the thesis is contradicted by Siger’s presence among the blessed philosophers. In the Comedy, Dante aimed to create a coherent vision of God’s universal order. In that light his attitude towards Arab or Muslim philosophy is of minor importance, and reveals neither a distinct interest in Muslim communities nor any accurate knowledge of Islam.
Only five Muslims are mentioned in the Comedy – Averroes and Avicenna (or Ibn Sina), along with the Sultan Saladin, are placed in Limbo (Inf. 6), and Mohammed and his son-in-law, Ali, figure in the eighth circle of Inferno (Inf. 28).Reference Hede7 Of the poem’s total of more than 14.000 lines, less than 20 are devoted to these five characters. Averroes, Avicenna and Saladin are listed as examples of human beings who achieved great things in life, but that were not saved because they had no knowledge of the Christian faith. Without any hope of salvation they spend their afterlife in the city of the so-called Sages, which is formally part of Inferno yet protected from the evils of Hell proper by seven walls. The three Muslims are the only ‘moderns’ among the Sages. All the others come from the illustrious ‘ancient’ past. Their Muslim background, then, seems to play no part in their placement in Dante’s highly personal version of the medieval Limbo.
Dante clearly regarded the ‘Saracens’ as severe enemies of Christendom, but he did not see them as radically separate from Christianity. In the Comedy, Mohammed and Ali are not condemned for having founded a new religion. Rather, they are condemned as ‘sowers of scandal and schism in life’ (Inf. 28: 35). The severity of their sin is manifest in the description of Mohammed as being split in two from chin to bowels and Ali having his head split from forehead to chin (Inf. 28: 22–33). Dante held Mohammed and Ali to be Christian schismatics and Islam to be a sectarian rebellion against the unity of the Christian church. Muslims held to some Christian doctrines but mixed them up with heretical and superstitious views. As such, they are included in Dante’s Christian conception of world order, yet at the same time excluded from any form of salvation. This double act of inclusion and exclusion, however, is not one of deliberate manipulation or distortion. As Richard Southern remarks about Dante’s general outlook in the Comedy, ‘even in contemporary affairs there is very little clarity of detail outside Italy; and outside the narrowest limits of western Europe all is dark. It is not that Dante is specially hostile to the rest of the world; he just does not see it at all.’Reference Southern and Baker8 Dante regarded Muslims as corrupted Christians because nothing gave him the impression that they could be conceived differently.
Dante and Islamic eschatology
The third reason why the question of Dante’s attitude towards Jews and Muslims has plagued scholars has to do with his literary sources of inspiration. Several scholars have argued that Dante’s vision of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise has much in common with Islamic visions of the afterlife. The thesis of an intimate relation between the Comedy and Islamic literature was originally proposed, though not substantiated, by the Jesuit historian of world literature Juan Andrés in the late 18th century.Reference Cantarino, De Sua and Rizzo9 In the beginning of the 20th century it was reinforced by the Spanish Arabist Miguel Asìn Palacios’s study of the relation between Dante’s otherworldly vision and Islamic eschatology.Reference Palacios10 However, there is a missing link to the theory. How did Dante become acquainted with Islamic eschatology? Asìn Palacios argues that Dante may have done so via some Jewish friends who perhaps knew Arabic (among them the already mentioned Immanuel of Rome), or through his teacher Brunetto Latini, who in 1260 was sent as Florentine ambassador to the court of Alfonso X in Toledo and Sevilla and there may have learned some Arabic which he then later would have passed on to Dante. Asín Palacios also suggested that precisely the scarcity of negative references to the Arab or Muslim world in the Comedy indicates that Dante may have been more open to Islamic sources than the majority of his fellow Christians.
Asín Palacios’s study gave rise to a severe polemic in Dante studies. This was further animated by the Italian ethnologist Enrico Cerulli’s discovery, in the Vatican library shortly after the Second Wold War, of an Islamic eschatological text translated into Latin and Old French around 1264 at Alfonso X’s court.Reference Cerulli11 This so-called Liber scalae Mahometi describes Mohammed’s ascent to Heaven and his descent to Hell. According to some Dante scholars, the Comedy parallels the Liber to the extent that we might consider the latter a true source of inspiration for Dante.Reference Corti and Asor Rosa12 But the number of concrete images from the Liber that might seem to have parallels in Dante’s poem is actually very scant. At best, then, we might agree with Philip Kennedy that the Comedy ‘was the product of a Europe engaged, anxiously at times, in the absorption, transformation and re-appropriation of literary elements preserved in Arab sources,’ and that the Liber provides us with ‘an understanding of the kind of channels through which these texts were absorbed.’Reference Kennedy, Aigius and Hitchcock13 As with Averroism, though, so too the cultural absorption of Arab sources is not crucial to an understanding of the thematic content of the Comedy.Reference Hede14 Dante’s horizon is too narrowly Christian and too focused on the classical sources of Pagan antiquity to leave much room for other forms of inspiration.
Dante and the Orient
The fourth reason for the interest that Dante’s attitude to Jews and Muslims has spurred concerns the problem of conceptual understanding. It has often been maintained that, in his attempt to embrace every conceivable aspect of God’s created world, Dante succeeded in creating an encyclopaedic poem or a sort of summa or synthesis of medieval culture that elucidates not only how medieval people imagined the afterlife, but also what they thought about Pagans, heretics, Jews and Muslims. In opposition to this, Aron Gurevich has recently argued that ‘we cannot judge what simple people thought about the afterlife based on Dante’s masterpiece,’ because ‘his description of the afterlife is deeply personal and poetic.’Reference Mazour-Matusevich15 The question we are left with, then, is whether Dante’s attitude towards non-Christians is also too personal and poetic to provide any general understanding of how medieval Christians looked upon Jews and Muslims.
We might argue that, by placing Mohammed and Ali in the lowest part of Hell, Dante contributed significantly to what Edward Said calls the ‘insensitive schematization of the entire Orient,’ and which he sees as originating already in ancient Greece. Dante then becomes an early representative of Western Orientalism that turns the Orient into something alien and places it ‘on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe.’Reference Said16 As soon as we take a somewhat broader view of Dante’s text, though, and try to avoid overstatement based on brief passages, it becomes increasingly difficult to uphold the view that Dante is representational of an entire age and of a generalized cultural intolerance in the West. Southern’s remark, quoted earlier, about Dante’s limited outlook supports this assertion. Dante lived in a region of which he had no true overview, and though geographically defined as ‘Europe,’ and predominantly Christian, this region was neither culturally nor religiously uniform. In addition, Dante’s status as an intellectual was exceptional. As Eric Voegelin points out, ‘Dante was the first Western thinker who had no status in a social group that would give representative authority to his word and form the audience for what he had to say … He was a party for himself, speaking by the authority of the majestas genii’ – that is, by the splendour of his inventive power.Reference Voegelin17 Though only one aspect of Dante’s existential position, this solitary status helps to explain why the Comedy stands out as something extraordinary in European literature.
Conceptualizing Dante’s worldview
Of the four issues outlined above, the conceptual is the most important because it is on the conceptual level that Dante’s attitude towards Jews and Muslims is revealed, not in his personal relation to Jews or in his knowledge, or lack thereof, of Arab philosophy and Islamic eschatology. I argue for a different kind of conceptual understanding than Said. My contention is that instead of situating Dante’s attitude towards Jews and Muslims along some grand scale of political ideas encompassing all of Western history, we should rather try and understand it from the perspective of existential experience.
It can be argued that Dante distinguishes five main categories of human beings. Christians were those that had chosen the right path in life. Pagans were those that, living before the Coming of Christ, never could found the right path. Jews were those that had been shown the right path but had rejected it. Muslims and heretics were those that, in spite of having the right path revealed to them, chose the path of perdition. Finally, the indifferent – collected in great number in the Vestibule of Hell (Inf. 3) – were those that went through life without ever choosing any path. When we look a little closer though at Dante’s political theory of world government as elaborated in the Monarchy and in his cosmological vision of divine order in the Comedy, it soon becomes clear that these categories are not the true constituents of Dante’s worldview. To be sure, Dante claims to embrace all nations and all people in his writings, but owing to his limited cultural outlook and his belief in the unity of the human race, the categories Dante uses in order to demarcate human differences and embrace non-Christians display no particular interest in outer differences, such as cultural customs and manners or ethnic and racial appearances. The Monarchy speaks of world government in the mortal world and the Comedy takes in the entire universe, but in an almost paradoxical way it is the inner chambers of the human mind that Dante ultimately is interested in – how does man become an ordered individual, and what drives some people to evil and others to virtuous deeds?
Dante’s political theory of dual ends
Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which medieval thinkers read as a treatise on government and ethics, and Politics were both translated into Latin during the 13th century. Inspired by these works, the age of Dante produced a great many political treatises that try to settle, often in polemical and controversial ways, the relation between secular and spiritual authority in the world of human affairs. The Monarchy is Dante’s contribution to this discussion. At the time the church struggled to maintain its status as the highest authority on earth. It became too involved in power politics, though, and increasingly came under the control of secular rulers. The pope’s settling in Avignon in 1309 is the most notable example of this.
In his political treatise Dante adopts a highly critical stance towards his own times, with the Italian peninsula continually ravaged by fierce conflicts. Like Machiavelli two centuries later, Dante substantiates his criticism with close readings of a great variety of sources. These enable him to formulate a general theory of how to solve the conflicts alluded to. Among the non-Christian sources, it is Roman texts that have the highest status. In Monarchy (II 4) Dante cites Livy, Lucan and Virgil in support of his claim that the founding of the Roman Empire was the work of divine providence: ‘it was aided by the help of miracles to achieve supremacy; therefore it was willed by God; and consequently it was and is founded by right.’18 Although rhetorically dealing with an issue specific to medieval Christendom – namely, the question of imperial authority in Italy – Dante’s wider concern is with how the secular and the spiritual realms can be reconciled, or held in balance, in the pursuit of greater happiness for all nations and all people.
In his treatise (III 15), Dante posits that human beings have two ends. They seek happiness in both their mortal and eternal lives. The former is symbolized by earthly and the latter by heavenly paradise. Mortal happiness can be gained by philosophical teachings and immortal happiness via spiritual guidance. Dante further says that the emperor and the pope are responsible for the achievement of both ends. The former should rely on philosophical teachings to secure happiness among human beings in this life, and the latter should rely on the revealed truth of the Holy Scriptures in directing human beings to the eternal life. According to Dante, the emperor is the highest authority in secular affairs, while the pope is the highest authority in spiritual matters. The latter should not interfere in political conflicts, but only provide religious guidance for their resolution.
The church and the empire are two divinely willed institutions intended to supersede all divisions among nations and people in the created world. Dante clearly emphasizes that their domains and functions are different, though. His theory of world order is a theory of independent spheres and co-equal powers, and differs significantly from the two then prevalent theories on the hierarchy obtaining between secular and spiritual power in the medieval period. The ninth-century Carolingian model favours imperial over papal power. The Gregorian model of the 11th century regards the church as in every respect superior to secular institutions.
In the Comedy as well as in Monarchy, several statements indicate that Dante’s theory of secular and spiritual co-equality involves a distinction between the visible and the invisible manifestation of the powers of the Holy Trinity. On the one hand, through the Incarnation, the Passion of Christ and the work of the Apostles, the church was founded by the visible mission of the second person of the Trinity (the Son). On the other hand, with his references to the ‘illustrious authors’ of antiquity, Dante indicates that, just as the church was founded by the visible mission of the Son, the (Holy Roman) empire was founded by the invisible mission of the Holy Spirit that manifests itself in mysterious ways. If so, the co-equality of the two institutions is evident. As the Son and the Holy Spirit, along with the Father, are co-equal in power, what they install or accomplish in the world of human affairs should be conceived as co-equal, too.
The categories of Jews and Muslims play no part in this discourse. But if we take seriously Dante’s theory as aiming at universality, and not just a rhetorical act with a narrow objective, it does seem as if Dante would have to assign some form of righteousness to the Jews and Muslims, or at the very least to those living within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. Indeed, even without converting to Christianity proper, yet simply by accepting the authority of the emperor in the world of human affairs and complying with the teachings of philosophy, they would, though unwittingly, be upholding the imperial institution founded by the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit as the manifestation of divine justice in the secular world. However, nowhere in his treatise does Dante confer any such righteousness upon the Jews and Muslims.
Secular and spiritual righteousness are the central constituents of Dante’s political theory of world government.Reference Hede19 He does not discuss though whether Jews and Muslims can be righteous because this is irrelevant to the general discussion of why the authority of the imperial institution is co-equal to the authority of the papal institution. Hence, although the Monarchy signals some sort of acceptance of religious or cultural differences on a conceptual level of discourse, it does not reveal how Dante includes non-Christians in his vision of world order. For that, we have turn to Dante’s theory of redemption in the Comedy.
Dante’s vision of the cosmos
In presenting his cosmological vision in the Comedy, Dante relies on the common scientific knowledge of his time and links this with Christian doctrine. Both in the details and in the general setting, Dante’s vision is a highly personal version of the medieval conception of the cosmos.
Basing himself upon Aristotle, Dante divides the universe into two major parts with the sphere of the moon as the dividing line. From the moon and upwards, we have the incorruptible world of nine spheres: the seven planetary heavens (the moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), the sphere of the fixed stars, also known as the firmament, and the sphere of the prime mover that controls the motions of the spheres. These nine spheres constitute the cosmic space of the Creation. Beyond them we have the ultimate heaven of angels and blessed souls that move around the Holy trinity in nine rings that correspond to the nine spheres of the Creation. This structural correspondence of heavenly rings and spheres is an invention of Dante’s. Moreover, during his flight through the nine spheres, as described in Paradiso, Dante encounters a great number of blessed souls who recount their mortal lives, displaying the virtues needed for entering the heavenly paradise. But these souls appear to Dante in the nine spheres, while they actually reside in the nine rings surrounding the Holy Trinity. This is another of Dante’s inventions.
Beneath the moon, we have the world susceptible to corruption and divided into two regions, North and South. The Southern region is covered by a great ocean, in the middle of which we find Mount Purgatory. In Purgatorio, we learn that this mountain is divided into two parts, with earthly paradise or the Garden of Eden at its top. The first part is Ante-Purgatory, where the deceased souls prepare themselves for the purgation of their sinful dispositions. The second part is Purgatory proper, where the souls purge themselves of their sinful dispositions by climbing seven terraces, each of which is identified with the seven capital sins (pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust). This version of the medieval notion of purgatory is almost entirely Dante’s invention. As for the Northern region of the corruptible world, it consists of three continents, Europe, Africa and Asia, with Jerusalem at the centre and Hell right beneath it. In Inferno, we learn that Hell is a giant pit into the interior of the earth, divided in its turn into nine circles that accommodate a great variety of sinful acts. The infernal pit was created when the landmasses of the Northern region fled the impact of Satan as he was cast out of Heaven, and escaped to the Southern region, whereby Mount Purgatory came into being. Again, Dante’s description of the structure and origin of Hell is highly original.
The overall theme of the Comedy is the difference between the sinful acts portrayed in Inferno, the vicious dispositions described in Purgatorio, and the various forms of virtuousness celebrated in Paradiso. For that reason, where non-Christians end up in Dante’s cosmos is all a matter of which principles of redemption Dante applies to them. The distinction between Christians and non-Christians is already a powerful marker in itself. Still, Dante does not simply assign non-Christians to Hell and Christians to Purgatory or Paradise. He emphasizes that baptism is the gateway to the Christian faith (Inf. 4: 36), and that faith is the first step on the road to salvation (Inf. 2: 29–30). As Hell and Purgatory are heavily populated by Christians, though, while some Pagans reside in Purgatory, and others even find a place among the blessed, along with various characters from the Old Testament, Dante makes clear that faith by baptism is no guarantee of salvation.
In medieval thought every human soul, in order to be saved, has to obey two kinds of ethics rooted, respectively, in the natural and supernatural domains. For the first form of ethics, human beings have to use their faculty of reason. In the Divine Comedy, the seven capital sins in essence come down to corruptions of this kind of ethics. The supernatural form of ethics is that which human beings can achieve by using their faculty of reason in accordance with the revealed truth of the Holy Scriptures and in devotion to the powers of divine grace that inspire each soul to act virtuously and direct it to the life of eternal bliss. The three so-called theological virtues of faith, hope and charity are examples of how the natural form of ethics can be elevated to the level of supernatural ethics. It is the ability to comply with these two forms of ethics that decides the afterlife of each soul.
In the Comedy, Dante develops his two-sided ethical theory by focusing, in particular, on how human beings constantly corrupt their ability of spiritual transcendence and deliberately imprison themselves in the world of secular needs. Dante’s condemnation of all forms of evil and sinful behaviour is severely aimed at what we might define, with a technical term mainly used in post-medieval studies, as ‘sovereign individuals’ who defy or neglect the two forms of ethics.Reference Seung20 These individuals inhabit Inferno. They are condemned because their mortal life was selfish, crudely ambitious, slanderous, violent, lazy, greedy, or driven by beastly desires. These are all medieval vices that can be restated as modern virtues whenever the fulfilment of secular needs is held to be more important than spiritual contemplation in the pursuit of the good life. Moreover, in Purgatorio the transgressions of the sovereign individuals are reflected in the penitents who now, by the aid of divine grace, purge their vicious dispositions and are given a second chance to fully embrace the Christian faith. Finally, in Paradiso the same individuals turn up in the stories of the blessed souls who are the true contraries of these sovereign individuals. In this perspective, we might argue that Dante’s poem displays a ruthless criticism of the modern secular ethos, long before the notion of modernity was invented, or that his criticism provides evidence for the theory, held by some political historians, that modernity was, in some respects, already in the making in the 13th century.
Dante’s notion of redemption
The nine circles of Inferno, the seven terraces of Purgatory and the ten spheres of Paradiso constitute Dante’s system of punishment and reward. Human beings are categorized according to their sinful acts, vicious dispositions or virtuous states of being. Although by no means irrelevant, religious conviction is not what primarily assigns a Jew or Muslim to a specific category of human beings. The presence of Averroes, Avicenna and Saladin in Limbo indicates that Dante held that some form of secular righteousness was possible without spiritual righteousness. These three non-Christians pursued the natural form of ethics. Technically speaking, they did not transgress the supernatural form of ethics because they could not reject what they did not know was required of them. They simply lacked the necessary means for directing their souls to the realm of divine blessings. In contrast, Dante condemns Mohammed and Ali as Christian schismatics because they violated both forms of ethics. In some medieval sources Mohammed is said to have been an envious cardinal who rebelled against the Christian church in rage of not having been elected pope.Reference Bosco21 Envy and rage are two evils that deprave the faculty of reason, and to rebel against the unity of the church is to act against the will of God.
However, the presence of non-Christians in Paradiso reveals the complexity of Dante’s theory of redemption. The appearance of the Trojan warrior Ripheus, mentioned in Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Roman emperor Trajan in the heaven of Jupiter (Par. 20: 106–123) suggests that, in mysterious ways, spiritual righteousness can be bestowed even on Pagans. Ripheus was righteous by divine predestination and Trajan was so by the work of divine grace. Together they provide evidence for the assertion that Dante believed the Roman Empire to have been the work of the Holy Spirit – Ripheus stands for the primordial manifestation of imperial authority and Trajan for its zenith in the Roman era. Moreover, in the highest heaven of the Empyreum we learn that Christians do not even make up a majority in Paradise.
In reaching the uncreated and eternal mansion of the blessed souls, the angels and the Holy Trinity, Dante sees how the souls form an immense rose neatly divided in two equal sections, one for the Christians, and one for the Jews. All seats are taken in the latter, while there are only few seats left in the former, of which some will be occupied by the blessed Pagans. The description of the rose suggests that there are more Jews in Paradise than Christians. Why is this so? This question has puzzled some Dante readers, although the reason is simple. As Robert Hollander explains, Dante held that ‘more Jews believed in Christ without the authority of His presence, as certified by the witness provided by the New Testament, than did Christians, even though they were given the answers before they took the exam.’22 However, the Jews dwelling in the ultimate heaven are all Biblical characters. Dante therefore seems to assign them a special kind of redemption.
Just as medieval theologians interpreted the events of the Old Testament as foretelling or prefiguring the events of the New Testament, Dante incorporates the Biblical Jews in his universal redemption history. In their mortal life they were Jews who obeyed the laws of the Old Testament. As they thus had found the gateway to the Christian faith before the actual Coming of Christ, they are Christians of the pre-Christian era, according to Dante’s vision of divine order. By making the ancient Christians surpass the modern Christians in number, and emphasizing the scarcity of empty seats in the heavenly rose, Dante seems to hold that the modern era has largely been miserable and the world is coming to an end.
Jesper Hede holds a PhD in European Studies and an MA in Italian and Medieval Studies. He is a postdoctoral fellow of comparative literature and the history of rhetoric at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. As well as various articles on Dante, he has authored Reading Dante: The Pursuit of Meaning (Maryland, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007). He is currently writing a book on the hermeneutics of rhetoric, on a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation.
