These words, it will be remembered, are addressed by Virgil, at the foot of the mountain of Purgatory, to Cato of Utica. Virgil is speaking of Dante, and of his mystical journey through the eternal world. The object of that quest, he says, is Liberty—that liberty which will make him master of himself morally and spiritually, when Virgil himself, at the summit of the Mountain, ere he takes his leave, shall crown him “King and bishop of his own mind and soul.”[35]

These moving lines, as D’Ovidio reminds us,[36] have drawn tears from many a patriot of the last century; they may well form for us a starting-point for the consideration of Dante’s attitude towards Political Liberty. True, it is ultimately spiritual liberty, liberty of soul, that the Poet “goes seeking” in his pilgrimage, even as it is slavery of soul from which he announces in Paradise[37] that Beatrice has delivered him. “Thou hast drawn me,” he says, “out of slavery into freedom ... thou has given health to my soul”—

But the conditions of spiritual and of bodily freedom are very close to one another—as many a languishing prisoner of war can testify—interlaced and interwoven if not identical.

It is possible, thank God, for the human spirit to rise superior to the most degrading conditions which inhuman brutality or fiendish hatred can impose. Yet an atmosphere of justice and peace is the right and normal environment for the soul’s free growth; and steady pressure of tyranny and calculated injustice will all but infallibly blunt and stunt the moral growth of its victims, as is witnessed by the universally blighting effect of Turkish rule. Moreover, unless the received political interpretation of the three Beasts of the Dark Wood[38] is wholly unwarranted, Professor D’Ovidio is right in claiming[39] that, in a true if subsidiary sense, Dante’s supernatural journey was “a refuge and a remedy” from the troubles in which the Poet found himself immersed in the tangled thicket[40] of an “enslaved Italy,” full of tyrants, and of that tyrannous faction-spirit which is the worst enemy of Freedom.[41]

The Italy of his day, like the Florence which cast him out, is a stranger to that Liberty which only Peace can give—a peace for which, on Dante’s horizon, no other hope appeared than that of a common subjection to the “Roman Emperor,” the divinely appointed guardian of justice among men.[42] Peace is, indeed, so closely linked with freedom that Dante, in one place,[43] speaks of it as the goal of his mystic quest.

whereas in the First Canto, Virgil has described that goal as liberty—

We may pause, then, on the context of these lines, wherein Dante’s quest of liberty is associated with Cato’s suicide. For the difficulty and obscurity of the situation which they raise will plunge us at once into the heart of Dante’s Political Theory.

The opening Canto of the Purgatorio shews us Cato of Utica, the austere republican who killed himself rather than bow to the rising dominance of Julius Caesar,[44] accorded a place of honour as Overseer of the souls in Ante-Purgatory. His loving wife Marcia is in Limbo; his fellow-republicans Brutus and Cassius are, with Judas Iscariot, in the lowest depths of Hell. There is, moreover, a special place in Hell[45] appointed for suicides, in a gruesome wood made fouler by the Harpies. Yet here is Cato honoured, and, further, held up by Virgil as pattern of the patriot who gives life for liberty! It has been a traditional crux to interpreters of the Divine Comedy, to explain and justify Cato’s position. To understand the fulness of the difficulty, and at the same time familiarise ourselves with Dante’s theory of the ideal government of the world, we shall need to turn to the treatise in which he holds up for the general admiration of mankind that Empire which to Cato was more hateful than death itself.

Next to the Divina Commedia, the De Monarchia—the “Monarchia” as it is more neatly styled in Italy—is, in many ways, Dante’s most important work. It lacks the charm as well as the literary importance of the Vita Nuova, and the autobiographical interest of that and the Convivio, but in it Dante develops his political theory, and by it—through Marsiglio da Padova and his Defensor Pacis[46]—he influences all subsequent generations.

The “Monarchy” which he expounds therein is not Autocracy as such; it is the traditional suzerainty of the Holy Roman Empire, in which, in spite of its actual failure in history, he sees an ideal centre of unity for Christian civilisation, an ideal Court of Appeal for international quarrels, a divinely ordained curb for personal and national greed and self-assertion, and so an unique guarantee of peace for the world.

The Monarchia is comprised in three Books. In the First, Dante sets himself to prove that the office of “Monarch” is necessary to the well-being of the world, developing his theory of “Monarchy” as such. In the Second, which is a long panegyric of the Roman Power, conceived as one and continuous from the days of Aeneas son of Anchises, he points to Rome as a providential instrument in God’s hand for the governing of the world and the well-being of mankind.[47] He establishes to his own satisfaction the thesis that the Holy Roman Empire, and it alone, provides the “Monarchy” he is seeking. In the Third he argues that, notwithstanding all that has been said and done by Popes, who (since Gregory VII—and notably in the person of the Poet’s contemporary, Boniface VIII)—claimed authority over all earthly potentates, the Secular Authority is, in its own sphere, not derived from, or subject to the Spiritual, but is independent; that the “Roman Prince” derives his authority and his inalienable responsibility direct from God Himself.

This last is the most original part of Dante’s treatise, and that of most general importance. For it saps the false temporal pretensions of the Papacy, the rottenness of which Dante was clever enough to discern long before the famous “Donation of Constantine” had been proved a forgery. But this subject need not detain us now. Our interest will be focussed mainly on the theme of the First Book; in a lesser degree on that of the Second, and we shall consider them both in the light of the Divina Commedia.

Dante’s reverence for the Roman Empire dates probably from his first study of the Aeneid, and is bound up with his passionate devotion to Virgil,[48] whom he addresses in the opening Canto of the Divina Commedia[49]

For him, as we have said, the Roman Power is continuous—from Aeneas, through Julius Caesar, and through Charlemagne to his own day. In the Second Book of the Monarchia he sets forth first the nobility of its origin, then the attestation of its divine character by “miracles”; he substantiates the claim of the Roman People to rule by the evidence of their “public spirit” and rightness of aim, and their unique faculty for governing; by their success against all competitors for world-empire—the prize sought so keenly by Cyrus, Xerxes, Alexander and the rest was attained by Rome alone. Finally, he adduces Christ Himself as a witness. Did He not choose to be born and to die for the world’s salvation under the authority of the Roman Empire?

In the Divine Comedy the theme of Rome’s glory receives an equally enthusiastic and a more poetic treatment. Its echoes ring all through the great poem, they become clamant and compelling in the Sixth Canto of the Paradiso, where, from the mouth of Justinian, in the Heaven of the world’s Workers, flows the story of the majestic flight of that “Uccel di Dio,” the Roman Eagle, through the centuries from Aeneas to Charlemagne.[50]

But the atmosphere of serene satisfaction which pervades the Monarchia is not maintained here. The opening Paean of triumph gives place to a more mournful note when the great Lawgiver turns to denounce the factions of later times: “the Guelphs striving to Frenchify Italy, the Ghibellines to Germanise it.”[51] Bitterly he assails the unworthy partisans of the Empire. The Eagle stands for Justice; let them practise their intrigues under some other standard[52]—

Here practice comes to blows with theory. The Roman “Monarchy” was, in Dante’s days, a failure. This failure was partly due to negligence of individual occupants of the throne of the Caesars, like Rudolf and Albert of Hapsburg,[53] partly to the usurping pretensions of the Papacy,[54] partly, again, to the turbulent, anarchic, and self-seeking spirit of cities and states.[55]

It was Dante’s misfortune to be born into a world seething with political faction, and into an Italy and a Florence in which the fever of faction was at its hottest.[56] The two most potent influences in Christendom—the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire—were at feud; and half the people of Italy (largely, if the truth must be told, to justify their existing group-enmities) sided with the Papacy, and called themselves “Guelfs,” half with the Empire, and called themselves “Ghibellines.” It is a mark of Dante’s greatness that, unlike most of his contemporaries, he was able to hold the balance true; to realise the immense value of each Authority, the Spiritual and the Temporal, if rightly wielded; to discern the God-given responsibility of each, and their mutual independence.

Exiled himself from Florence by political faction, victim of the ruthless partisan spirit which ruled in his native city, he felt keenly the need of a supreme controlling power, a generally accepted and incorruptible Court of Appeal; and he looked forward to the descent into Italy of the Emperor Henry VII in 1311 as to the return of a Golden Age[57]—of a Peace long wept for, and still delayed:[58]

Many think that the Monarchia was written to celebrate this advent of one to whom he is not afraid to address the sacred words: “Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi!”[59]

Dante’s hopes in Henry VII were doomed to disappointment. The disappointment did not shake his faith in the Holy Roman Empire as a panacea for all the temporal ills of a Christendom distracted by individual and national self-seeking and aggression.

If we turn to the First Book of the Monarchia, wherein Dante develops his Political Theory, we shall find that, at first reading, the actual person of the Emperor seems essential; just as, at first sight, he seems to rule out Democracy, together with Oligarchy and Tyranny, as a “perverted form of Government.”[60] Here we must remember Dante’s environment. His personal experience of the chances of freedom and justice in his native city would give him an instinctive bias against a non-monarchial form of government. Whether the system by which Florence ruled itself in the opening years of the fourteenth century is technically to be styled Democracy or Oligarchy, or a compound of the two, it was certainly, in practice, for Dante, a Hydra-headed Tyranny of the worst description. Further, it may be well to realise that personal authority was the only type of Suzerainty, the only form in which a paramount and impartial Sway, or a world-wide Court of Appeal had appeared on his mental horizon.

It has been said of Mazzini’s Republicanism that it did not rule out “Imperialism” in the sense familiar to British minds, of “The White’s Man’s Burden.” He approved of the British Raj in India, and pictured his own free Italy of the future as possibly destined to spread the blessings of her own historic civilisation by a similar rule over pupil-peoples. May it be claimed in like manner for Dante, whose writings so profoundly inspired Mazzini and his fellow patriots of the Risorgimento, that though he is in a sense a thorough-going Imperialist, yet his Imperialism is, at bottom, not inconsistent with a more modern aspiration for a “World made safe for Democracy,” and kept safe by a “League of Nations”?

Dante is Imperialist; but if we enquire of him what is the raison-d’-Être of Empire, he will answer: “It is the temporal well-being of mankind.” This “well-being” consists in the fulfilment of the purpose of man’s earthly life; the true and unobstructed self-expression of that personal freedom of choice—that prerogative of self-determination—which God has given to man as His divinest gift: unique and universal endowment of His intelligent creatures—that “Liberty of Will” which is so nobly hymned by Beatrice in the Paradiso (v. 19-24)—

In his Political Theory, as in his Mystic Pilgrimage, Dante is the Apostle of Liberty.

This noble couplet, which has moved the hearts of countless heroes and martyrs of the Risorgimento, even as our English Poetess was moved in ’48 at the sound of a child’s voice singing beneath her window “O bella LibertÀ, O bella ...!”—this couplet bears with it, as we have seen, a reference which has puzzled all the commentators, because it links with Dante’s quest of spiritual liberty the deed of Cato of Utica: the suicide by which that intransigent republican escaped submission to the founder of the Empire. And not only is Cato given an honourable place at the foot of the Mountain of Purgatory, and assured that, at the Great Day, his self-slain body shall be glorified[61]; but in the Monarchia,[62] Dante actually quotes with approval Cicero’s dictum in the De Officiis that for Cato “it was more fitting to die than to look upon the face of a tyrant!” There may be other reasons for this strange discrepancy in Dante’s scheme; but one is clear. Liberty ranks so high in the Poet’s mind that it over-rides all other considerations: its typical votary may win most extraordinary and exceptional treatment!

Well, an essential condition of this all-precious Liberty, this full and unobstructed self-expression and self-determination among nations, is Peace.

Such a peace must needs embrace harmony within the individual life, in the home circle, in smaller local and municipal units, and, finally, harmony between the various nations of Christendom, over all of which, ideally, the mantle of the one Empire would be spread. Such a Christendom, and such an Empire, for Dante, ideally embraces the whole of mankind. This all-embracing character is, in fact, essential to it; and it is important for our purpose to note that this complete world-wide embrace (the antidote to personal ambition) never has been, and is never likely to be, achieved by any personal sovereignty.

In this teaching the Monarchic Principle is, on the surface at least, more than an abstraction. It is everywhere personified, though it claims to exclude, as far as may be, the characteristically individual element of greed and self-assertion.[63] To Dante it is self-evident that peace in any of the concentric rings of human life—family, municipal, national, international—can only be secured by the recognised dominance of a single person in each circle.[64] In illustration of this principle he quotes (from Aristotle) Homer’s verse about the Cyclops[65]: “Each of them lays down the law for his own children and wives”; but he ignores the anarchic conclusion of the sentence ... “and they take no heed of each other.”[66] Nor does he follow Aristotle[67] in characterising this as “an uncivilised form of government”; otherwise, he might have adduced the Cyclops rather as an abuse of the Monarchic Principle. The fact is, that in each of the concentric circles the principle is only too liable to abuse; and Dante knows it, else he would not have strewn the realms of his Inferno with the tormented shades of those who have been guilty of such abuse—have been brutal tyrants in the home, in the city, on the throne. If we would gauge the depth of indignation which such abuse can rouse in Dante, we have only to turn to Hugh Capet’s speech in Purg. xx. 40-96, where the denunciation of the savagely self-assertive Royal House of France, with its infamous record of oppression, fraud, treachery, murder, and sacrilege, might be applied directly, with scarce a change of phrase, to the Hohenzollerns of to-day.

No doubt the personal guidance—even forceful guidance—may be necessary in early stages, as we have found it necessary among the child-races of Africa. Even the Hohenzollern style of rule, in our day so monstrous an anachronism, might have had its justification in far-back ages. It would perhaps compare favourably with its true antecedents, the Nineveh and Babylon of Old Testament times. “The Mailed Fist” may have its place, ere men have learnt—

But now we are beginning to realise that it is a thing—

Ultimately, it is a Supreme Tribunal that Dante yearns for, albeit he conceives that Tribunal as personified—incarnate in the “Roman Prince”.[68] It is impartiality,[69] above all, that Dante looks for; an impartiality to be guaranteed by that absence of ambition which an undisputed, world-wide supremacy might carry with it, “leaving nothing to be desired.” The authority that is free from taint of greed and self-interest, and so from the temptation to use human lives as means for its own ends, will most effectually display that “charity or love which gives vigour to justice.” For “Charity, scorning all other things, seeks God and man, and, consequently, the good of man.”

Surely such impartiality and such human consideration might be looked for in a representative tribunal at least as hopefully as in a fallible individual like that Henry VII, on whom, in life, he built such soaring hopes,[70] and for whom, beyond death, he prepared so high a seat in Heaven?[71]

That it is a Tribunal that Dante is really seeking, is clear from the Tenth chapter of the First Book of the Monarchia. And it may be permissible to adduce in this connection a note on that chapter by an eminent Dante scholar (to whom not a few of the thoughts in this Essay are indirectly due), written at least ten years before the outbreak of the World-War.

“Nothing,” says Mr. Wicksteed, (ad loc. p. 149), “could better help the student to distinguish between the substance and the form of the De Monarchia, or to free himself from slavery to words, than reflection upon this chapter. He will see that Dante’s ‘imperialism’ does not mean the supremacy of one nation over others, but the existence of a supreme law that can hold all national passions in check; so that the development of international law and the establishment of arbitration are its nearest modern equivalents; and the main difficulty is found in the want of any power of compulsion by which the nations can be made to refer their quarrels to the supreme tribunal and accept its awards, whether it sits at Rome or at the Hague.”[72]

What shape, we may ask, would Dante’s theory of the Temporal and Spiritual Authority have assumed, had it seen the light in the Twentieth Century instead of the Fourteenth? How would he shape it now?... How, perchance, does he shape it now if he looks down from “an eternal place” upon this “little plot” of an earth which has so often been the cockpit of international ferocity—

He would see a world that has for generations clean forgotten that Holy Roman Empire which loomed so large in his day, and is just giving the coup-de-grace to two unholy Empires that were playing a rÔle exactly the opposite of that of Dante’s ideal Roman Prince, whose chief care is to see that “in areola ista mortalium libere cum pace vivatur;”[74] a world in which a bastard Roman Empire, seeking not peace and freedom for the nations, but living for war, has striven for four long years with all its might to crush the rest of the world under an iron heel.

He would see a world in which the Papacy is no longer paramount in Western Christendom; in which its spiritual claims are largely challenged, and its temporal pretensions reduced to the shadow of a sham. A world in which industrialism and the fruits of applied science have transfigured at once the material and the social landscape. With the passing of German Military Autocracy, the last traces of Feudalism are like to disappear.... A world in which the development of national self-consciousness, in its infancy during his lifetime, has increased and multiplied. He would see a world, in short, both inwardly and outwardly utterly different from that for which he legislated in the Monarchia, save for the two permanent factors—the identity of human nature, and the continuity of Divine guidance, by Him “qui est omnium spiritualium et temporalium gubernator” (loc. cit.)

Would he not acclaim the passion for justice and freedom which has inspired the nations of the Entente to pile up their enormous sacrifices in a five years’ struggle? Had he compared the conduct of each side—had he compared merely their treatment of prisoners of war—could he have doubted for a moment which side exhibited the princely spirit of Charity “which gives vigour to justice:” caritas maxime justitiam vigorabit.[75]

Would he not see in the actions and aims of Italy—“Redeemed Italy”—and her victorious allies, a surer hope for the stable peace of mankind than ever his “Romanus Princeps” could have furnished? Would he not have found his own aspirations for a just and impartial and supra-national Tribunal embodied in that arbitrament which the “League of Nations” carries with it?

Would he not turn to individual nations (in the spirit of Mon. i. 5) and say: “See to it that this principle of freedom and justice rules throughout; that the spirit which looks ‘only to God and the good of man’[76] inspires all your life-circles: the Home, the City, the Province, the entire Nation. See to it that the brotherly, unselfish, co-operating spirit has sway not only between the members of the various classes and groups and interests of which your nation is composed, but that it dominates also the relations of class to class and group to group? What can better guarantee internal peace in a composite, democratic community, than that each of the elements of which it is composed shall be dominated by a single spirit—the spirit of free fellowship, which is the surest antidote[77] to the anti-social poison of greed and self-assertion?”

Would he not also see that the maintenance of such a spirit demands also a Spiritual Authority, one and forceful?

The “Sun and Moon” of Spiritual and Temporal Authority of the Monarchia,[78] which in the Purgatorio have become “two Suns,” to light men on the earthly and the heavenly path, he would find still essential in a “World made safe for Democracy.” In 1300, he found the Spiritual Sun usurping the powers of the Temporal, and so putting them out of gear.[79] The Roman Prelate had annexed the Roman Prince’s sword and united it incongruously with his own pastoral staff—

To-day he might rather see the Spiritual Sun eclipsed by the Temporal. Religious sanctions will be needed to inspire and elevate the democratic and multi-personal successor of the “Roman Prince” as the guardian of the world’s Justice and Freedom. God Himself is the “Living Justice,”[80] and He alone can wean human hearts from envy and that to which envy leads—

And “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty.”[81] For Freedom’s sake and Justice’s sake, Dante would demand some independence still, of the Sword and the Pastoral Staff. He would demand (to modify Cavour’s famous phrase) “a free Church in a league of free States”—a unified Church to match the union of Peoples; a democratic Church to inspire a democratic World, no longer an Ecclesiastical Autocracy, but a Federation (shall we say?) of free National Churches, parallel to the Temporal Authority of the future—the United States of the World.

A democratic world, indeed, yet an “Empire” too, after all; gladly submissive to the perfect sway, over Church and State alike, of the King of Kings[82]—

A God whose influence, though more resplendently manifest in some spheres than in others, interpenetrates the whole of His universe, as in the magnificent opening words of the Paradiso—

A human world which reflects the peace of that wider creation which “works like a giant and sleeps like a picture”—a peace built on the only sure foundation, namely, the harmonious co-operation of mighty, God-given forces, working together under the hand of God Himself.[83]

With his last breath, as it were, the great Poet reminds us, to look up to the Eternal Love that sways the constellations ... and the hearts of men[84]—