Dante's Idea of Rome

Andreas Kablitz is a Professor at the Institute of Romance Philology at the University of Cologne, where he also directs the Petrarcha-Institute. In 1997 he was awarded the Leibniz-Preis from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. His works include "Poetry of Self-Loss. On Canzone No. 360 (with an excursus on the history of Christian semantics of Eros)" (1998), Alphonse de Lamartines "Meditations poetiques"  (1985), and Mimesis und Simulation, which he co-edited with Gerhard Neumann (1997).

In this lecture, Kablitz talks about his recently published work Poetics of Redemption: Dante's Divine Comedy (De Gruyter, 2021), which is a collection of essays on Dante that interpret his Commedia as an attempt of renewal of the Christian work of salvation by means of literature. In this view, the sacro poema responds to a historical moment of extreme danger, in which nothing less than the redemption of mankind is at stake. The degradation of the medieval Roman Empire and the rise of early capitalism in Florence entailed a pernicious moral depravation for Dante. These are to him nothing but a variety of symptoms of the fall of the world into its state prior to its salvation by the incarnation of Christ.

Kablitz writes about this lecture:

Dante’s idea of the Roman Empire not only provides an explanation for the - at first glance - surprisingly important role of the pagan Virgil in the Commedia, but is also a key concept for Dante’s theories of secular and salvation history.

In his prose treatises Convivio and De Monarchia Dante, heavily drawing on Aristotle, conceives of monarchy as of the best of all possible political states and the Roman Empire as its prototype. Historically it provides the necessary precondition for the Incarnation. The Comedy highlights the importance of Rome and Virgil by means of the significant correspondences in its allegorical topology: the initial forest of sins, signifying the fallen world, contrasts with earthly paradise at the summit of mount purgatory; and Virgil’s rescue of Dante from the selva oscura thus comes to anticipate the procession of the authors of the Bible in earthly Paradise. Virgil as the author of the Aeneid is thus not only a poetic model, but his genealogy of the Roman Empire is revalued as the secular counterpart of salvation history, as outlined in the Bible. The Valley of Princes (Purgatory, VII, 43-VIII, 130) can be interpreted as an ideal figuration of the Roman Empire and, as it were, the prelapsarian state of the political world. On the other hand, to attribute this eminent importance to the Roman Empire endangers the historical fortune of the project of salvation itself, the realisation of which, with the decay of the Roman Empire, seems likewise undermined.

The second part of the essay consequently deals with the problem of this decay from Virgil’s up to Dante’s times and elucidates the relevance of Redemption and Easter in this respect: they are apt to reverse and remedy the actual historical decay of the Roman Empire. This can be gleaned from the speech of Emperor Justinian, whom the wanderer meets in the Heaven of Mercury. History there is described by means of the mythical concept of permanent struggle (between Evil and Virtue). The final - and permanent - victory of God and Good is safeguarded by a specific merging of concepts: the eagle, metonymically representing the Roman Empire, is identified with the topical figural concept, according to which Christ is an eagle which brings about spiritual renewal. This identification immunizes the Roman Empire against the real decay of its power, promising its permanent regeneration from the might of faith.

At the same time this identification alters the traditional relationship between a figura and its implementum. The eagle used to be a figura of Christ, whose incarnation constituted the implementum. But in the fortune of the Roman Empire the eagle stands for a permanent condition, a transhistorically existence principle of salvation, which as such not only allows for periods of weakness, but presupposes them as a logical necessity.

Significantly enough, it is an eagle who ravishes the Dante in his dream (Purg., IX, 19-43) and carries him from the Valley of Princes to the entrance of Purgatory: this wanderer’s moral regeneration and the epic resulting from it thus very obviously play an important part in God’s plan to reinstate the ancient perfection of the Roman Empire.