Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion PDF
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Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion This page intentionally left blank DANTE’S PLURALISM AND THE ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Gregory B. Stone DANTE’SPLURALISMANDTHEISLAMICPHILOSOPHYOFRELIGION © Gregory B. Stone, 2006. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-7130-2 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-53292-6 ISBN 978-1-4039-8309-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781403983091 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stone, Gregory B., 1961– Dante’s pluralism and the Islamic philosophy of religion / Gregory B. Stone. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321. Divina commedia—Sources. 2. Eschatology, Islamic, in literature. I. Title. PQ4394S76 2006 851(cid:2).1—dc22 2005049547 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Human perfection is achieved only in social life and this in turn is achieved only through moral virtue: thus it is necessary that humans be good, although it is not necessary that they know the truth. Averroes This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Introduction: A Comedyfor Non-Christians 1 Part I Virgil’s Happiness (Dante, Al-Farabi, Philosophy) 59 Part II The Right Path (Dante’s Universalism) 173 Notes 283 Works Cited 311 Index 319 INTRODUCTION: A COMEDY FOR NON-CHRISTIANS The poem that Dante called Comedy was first entitled The Divine Comedy more than two centuries after the poet’s death, on the title page of an edition printed in Venice in 1555. The adjective “divine” was added by the Venetian publisher more as a way to praise the poem’s seem- ingly superhuman artistry than as an indicator of its content and concern. But the title The Divine Comedy, which we have come to mistake for the original, determines for us a certain horizon of expectations: we think that Dante must be primarily interested in disclosing the facts concerning God and divine things, that his poem in its essence involves the presentation of religious—specifically, Christian—truth. We might do well to stop calling Dante’s poem The Divine Comedy, if only to help hold open the question concerning its religiosity. There is no doubt but that the Comedy is chock-full of Christian vocabulary, biblical allusions, and Scholastic theology. But this does not mean that Dante’s aim, the guiding orientation of his project, is necessarily Christian. Dante is very frequently referred to as “the great Catholic poet”—as if he were the official spokesperson of the medieval Catholic Church. But we should bear in mind that that same church banned as heretical Dante’s Monarchy, his chief book of political philosophy and the ideological blueprint of the Comedy. As one scholar recently has remarked: “There is an obvious irony in the reputation of Dante because in recent times he has so often been regarded as a pillar of Catholic orthodoxy. In the last decade of his life and the first decade after it no one would have thought of him that way.”1In 1329, just a few years after Dante’s death, a certain Cardinal Poujet, nephew of the pope, ordered all copies of Monarchyto be burned, and the title appears on the Vatican’s “Index of Prohibited Books” in 1554. These efforts by the church to suppress Dante’s thinking did not prevent the work from being widely circulated, although in the form of anonymous and falsely titled manuscripts that were, at times, 2 DANTE’S PLURALISM AND RELIGION IN ISLAM surreptitiously hidden within other more acceptable works.2The fact that the first printed edition (1559) appeared in Basel, a center of Lutheranism, indicates that Dante was regarded in some circles as a “proto-Protestant” author. The Vatican’s prohibition of Monarchywas not lifted until the late nineteenth century. But this rehabilitation of Dante’s reputation in the eyes of the church had less to do with an objective reexamination of theissues than with Pope Leo XIII’s strategic deployment of Dante as cul- tural capital useful for the promotion of neo-Scholasticism: Dante was henceforth represented by the church as having given magnificent poetic expression to the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, itself honored as the measure of orthodoxy.3 Dante’s extremely virulent opposition to the church, his sympathy for various heretical movements, and his call for the radical limitation of the role allotted to “faith” in political life were con- veniently ignored, since his very name could lend considerable prestige to the institutions of Catholicism. Around the turn of the century, for instance, the founder of the Dante collection at the University of Notre Dame argued that “in order for Notre Dame to achieve the greatness of European universities, it must have a great library; moreover, to become a great Catholic university, it must have the premier collection of works by and about the great Catholic Poet.”4The notion of “Dante the Catholic” is primarily a modern invention. We should regard with a healthy dose of skepticism the idea that Dante presents, as its spokesperson, a great syn- thesis of the fundamental tenets of the Church—especially considering that, in the long ideological struggle between church and state that unfolded from, say, the twelfth century through the Renaissance, Dante was without question a champion—one of the great champions—of thestate.5 The Comedy is a poem more famous than read. The average well- educated American reader knows little more about Dante than that Inferno offers a vivid and systematic classification of gruesome retributions. Beyond this, one might know simply that Dante’s poem is “religious” or “Christian.” And this latter assumption plays no small role in limiting Dante’s readership. For there are undoubtedly various communities of readers who, hearing that the Comedy is a Christian poem (or, for some, simply hearing it called The Divine Comedy), will turn away from it— assuming that it might speak to Christians or to the spiritually inclined but not to others. The more we thoroughly Christianize every aspect of the Comedy, the more we contribute to narrowing the scope of its appeal.6 One way to honor Dante’s poem is to show how it may speak to audiences of different faiths (or to those of no faith). This does not mean making the poem into something it is not. It means reopening the question of what it is.
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