Ernest L. Fortin: Dissidence et Philosophie au Moyen Âge: Dante et ses antécédents. Montreal: Bellarmin, 1981.
Review published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 12, No. 1. 1984.
[Two decades after its publication, this book was translated into English and republished under the title Dissent and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: Dante and His Precursors. Marc A. LePain translation. Lanham: Lexington Press, 2002.]
Artful self-contradiction and even syllogisms left incomplete enable philosophic writers to suggest unpopular thoughts to some readers. but poetic writing poses a dilemma for careful readers. Is the self-contradicting poet rational? Does he aspire to reason? Or does he believe something “because” it is absurd? (Walt Whitman put it with equanimity: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself….”)
Dante appears to bring fewer problems in this respect than, for example, Shakespeare. Dante celebrates reason. But he also celebrates Christianity, founded in part on the teaching that philosophic wisdom is folly. Does the poet who celebrates reason and Christianity subvert Christianity or baptize reason? How can anyone find out?
Fortin opposes the majority of today’s medievalists, who regard Dante as a poetical Aquinas. More than one-third of the pages here consist of firm scholarly assurances that such a thing as “the politic mode of philosophy” exists. (Although contemporary scholars readily accept the existence of mystical esotericism, rational esotericism seems much more improbable to many of them). Fortin discusses al-Farabi, Averroës, and Maimonides, tracing their kind of writing to Plato. He recounts the condemnation of Aristotle’s works in 1277 by the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier. He prudently observes that Siger and Boethius, Aristotle’s ill-fated medieval apologists, “had not sufficiently reflected upon the human and social conditions of philosophy”; their excessive candor almost invited the Bishop’s revenge. If Dante was indeed an Aristotelian, he had every reason to proceed with caution.
In Paradiso, Dante represents Siger’s sole wrong as the teaching of “truths susceptible to stirring up the malevolence or envy of his contemporaries.” This is one of several Dantean teachings that might stir malevolence or envy against Dante, were they not seemingly overwhelmed by far more numerous pieties. Fortin refuses to be overwhelmed—even to the extent of writing that Dante regarded political philosophy as “this master discipline” less than twenty pages after quoting Dante’s slightly different assertion that political philosophy is the “master of public things.” Such well-shaded imprecision, coupled with the necessarily selective approach to evidence that the brevity of his interpretation requires, will surely not force “apologists for the orthodox Christianity of the poem [to]…. admit their impotence before this opaque residue that ceaselessly comes to trouble our [!] repose and puts all in question.” Those apologists have their own reservoirs of ingenuity. That notwithstanding, one may say with some certainty that Fortin instructively follows an observation by one of his teachers, Leo Strauss, who noticed that when most readers come across a passage in a long and complex book which contradicts the overall argument the author seems to be making, they tend to overlook, ignore, or explain away the anomaly. Fortin is not such a reader.
Fortin’s strength will force some readers to look at the Commedia with more care, and more skepticism. At the very beginning of his commentary he observes that he does not intend to offer a comprehensive interpretation of the poem, only to spur the curiosity of others. He recognizes that a conclusive interpretation would have to show how the whole poem works.
Recent Comments