The Uncanonical Dante: the Divine Comedy and Islamic Philosophy

Chapter Two The role of Islamic thought in Dante is a vast topic and has been extensively debated. In a brief essay, I cannot explore this subject**[End Page 140]** systematically and thus will confine myself to one small facet of it, concentrating on the Limbo episode of theInferno , one of the most puzzling sections in the entire poem from a theological perspective. Dante did not invent the notion of Limbo; the idea emerged in response to a set of theological questions that troubled many medieval thinkers. Some were disturbed by the thought that people otherwise virtuous according to Christian standards would end up damned for all eternity merely because of where or when they were born. In particular, people born before the coming of Christ were denied access to the Christian revelation and thus never had the opportunity to embrace the Christian faith and be saved. Such considerations led to the development among medieval theologians of the idea of Limbo, a place in between, neither quite heaven nor hell. In the standard view, Limbo included two categories: Old Testament worthies who had lived virtuously and anticipated the coming of Christ, along with children who died before having been baptized (thereby dealing with another troublesome issue of salvation).6 Thus Dante inherited a concept of Limbo, but he developed it in a very unorthodox way, choosing to add to the categories of people admitted to Limbo and shifting his emphasis away from the traditional areas.7 Above all, he fills Limbo with figures out of classical antiquity.8 Conventional medieval opinion would lead us to expect to find that Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and King David once occupied Limbo, but not Hector, Aeneas, Junius Brutus, Camilla, and Lucretia as we see in Dante.

However heretical Dante's treatment of these virtuous pagans might be, one could argue that he remains within the larger bounds of Christian orthodoxy because after all he presents Limbo as a form of punishment. The figures in Limbo are said to suffer because they feel themselves deprived of the true God, for Whom they yearn. But here one must read Dante carefully and follow closely the pattern of his presentation of Limbo. At first sight, being in Limbo seems painful, but as the canto proceeds, Dante subtly and quietly starts to modify the first impression we get of Limbo and to mitigate the punishment embodied there.

As Dante enters Limbo, he notes the suffering of the inhabitants:

Here, for as much as hearing could discover,

there was no outcry louder than the sighs

that caused the everlasting air to tremble.

The sighs arose from sorrow without torments,[End Page 141]

out of the crowds--the many multitudes--

of infants and of women and of men.

(iv, 25­30)

But when we get to the middle of canto iv, the intensity of suffering in Limbo has evidently diminished. This is how Dante describes his encounter with the great poets of antiquity:

I saw four giant shades approaching us;

in aspect, they were neither sad nor joyous.

(iv, 83­84)

From initially appearing as a place of sorrow, Limbo now seems a purely neutral state ("né trista né lieta").9 In the space of fewer than one hundred lines, Dante appears to contradict himself, and we want to ask him: "Which is it? Are the figures in Limbo in pain or merely 'neither sad nor joyous'?"

This kind of apparent contradiction can be explained as a deliberate rhetorical strategy on Dante's part, one made necessary by the intellectually represssive climate in which he was writing. During the Middle Ages, religious heresy was, to say the least, not well received, and could be punished severely, with excommunication, imprisonment, and even death. Dante came under suspicion of heretical views during his lifetime, and at least one passage in theDivine Comedy shows that he was writing under the shadow of doubts about his piety.10 Under these circumstances, if Dante was intent on putting forth any form of heretical views in the Divine Comedy, he could not do so openly but had to go about the task very circumspectly.11 At the most exposed point in canto iv, the opening, where his readers are forming their crucial first impressions of what he is up to, he puts the orthodox among them at ease by telling them what they want to hear, that he may be offering the virtuous pagans an alternative to outright hell in Limbo, but they will still be enduring pain. In the less exposed middle of the canto, Dante reveals that the great poets of antiquity are not suffering at all in Limbo, but have achieved a state of emotional equanimity that comports quite well with the classical idea of greatness of soul they seem to represent.12

Dante's sympathy with and admiration for the virtuous pagans is even more evident in his treatment of the ancient philosophers in Limbo, the last group of inhabitants he presents. We learn nothing about whether they are suffering, only that Aristotle is being honored by the [End Page 142] rest of the company. With everyone from Socrates and Plato to Democritus and Zeno present, the philosophers are positioned for an eternity of debating the great issues that divided them.13 Now, for anyone who has ever been stuck in a late afternoon philosophy seminar, this may seem like precisely the formula for hell at its most horrific. But from the point of view of the philosophers themselves, it is difficult to conceive of a situation more perfectly suited to their wishes than the one Dante grants them in Limbo. In a famous passage in Plato's Apology, Socrates, faced with the prospect of death, outlines a view of the afterlife that seems to be a blueprint for Dante's Limbo:

if death is like a journey from here to another place, and if the things that are said are true, that in fact all the dead are there, then what greater good could there be than this, judges? . to associate with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer, how much would any of you give? . To converse and to associate with them and to examine them there would be inconceivable happiness. 14

Dante did not read Greek, and it is unlikely that Plato'sApology was available to him in any form of translation. But he frequently displays knowledge of Plato's works,15 and this passage may be a source for Dante's conception of Limbo. But whether or not Dante had this passage in mind,

the fact is that he punishes the ancient philosophers by placing them in a situation which Plato had Socrates picture as the greatest reward possible. In that sense, Dante's Limbo points ahead to the portrait of Hell in a more clearly unorthodox writer, Christopher Marlowe. His Doctor Faustus tells the devil Mephistopheles:

Nay, and this be hell, I'll willingly be damned here.

What! Sleeping, eating, walking and disputing?16

The portrayal of the ancient philosophers in Limbo seems a very unorthodox act on Dante's part, as he displays a proto-Renaissance admiration for a variety of forms of classical virtue. But the situation seems even odder when we go down the cast of characters in Limbo and discover that several important Muslim figures are present. Here Dante is really stretching the idea of virtuous pagans. It is one thing to put ancient Greeks, Trojans, and Romans in Limbo (though Dante appears to be the only Christian who did so). All these figures were born before the coming of Christ, and hence had no opportunity to receive the**[End Page 143]** Christian revelation, be baptized, and hence be saved. But what are Muslims doing in Dante's Limbo? By any definition of Limbo, including the one Dante has Virgil offer (iv, 37), Muslims do not belong. They were born well into the Christian era, and thus had the opportunity to become Christians. They cannot offer a geographic excuse, like the man born on the banks of the Indus River Dante mentions in the Paradiso who simply lives too far removed from Christian teaching (xix, 70­78). Then, as now, Muslims lived in close proximity to Christians, many of them in the Holy Land itself.17 In the European Middle Ages Muslims represented the chief enemies of Christianity, an attitude solidified by Dante's time by many years of Christian-Muslim conflict in the Crusades. And who of all people should show up in Dante's Limbo but Saladin, perhaps the greatest of all the Muslim warriors during the era of the Crusades and the most successful against Christian forces? To be sure, Saladin was admired for his nobility and greatness as a warrior by his military opponents from Christian Europe. But this was the admiration of soldiers for one of their profession. A theologian is supposed to have different standards for judging people, and it is most peculiar that Dante chooses to assign as comfortable a berth as possible in the afterlife to Saladin, the great warrior against Christianity.18

The final two figures named in canto iv are also Muslims, two of the most famous medieval Islamic philosophers, Avicenna and Averroës. Although both are fascinating figures, I will concentrate on the more important of the two, Averroës, or Abu al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd, to give him his full Arabic name.19 In canto iv, Dante calls him the man who made "the great Commentary" ("'l gran comento"; iv, 144), referring to the many commentaries Averroës wrote on the books of Aristotle. Through these works Averroës exerted a great influence on the Christian thinkers of Europe such as St. Thomas Aquinas. But the extent of Averroës's influence on medieval Christian thought does not mean that he was widely respected or even accepted in the European Christian intellectual community. On the contrary, Averroës was probably the most widely condemned thinker in the medieval Christian world. He was generally

regarded as a free thinker, subversive of all religious orthodoxy, and the term Averroism became virtually synonymous with atheism in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.20 The charge of Averroism was one of the most serious accusations that could be made against a medieval thinker.

Thus one would think that Dante would have placed Averroës among the heretics in the Inferno or perhaps among the schismatics with**[End Page 144]** Mohammad and Alì.21 Instead he places Averroës with the ancient philosophers Dante greatly admired, thus giving an honored position to perhaps the most feared and hated thinker in the Christian Middle Ages. Averroës could not make the excuse that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle could make of having been born before the coming of Christ. Averroës was in fact born in 1126 ad in C. Averroës could not make the excuse that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle could make of having been born before the coming of Christ. Averroës was in fact born in 1126 onored position to perhaps the most feared and hated thinker in the Christian Middleen in our general ignorance of Muslim history we try to imagine how in the Middle Ages ideas from, say, Baghdad could have made it all the way to Florence. But in fact the Iberian Peninsula was for several centuries one of the centers of the Islamic intellectual world, and thus Averroës was virtually Dante's neighbor.22

Dante was in fact accused of being an Averroist,23 and he refers to Averroës directly and indirectly several times in his writings. Sometimes he speaks of Averroës approvingly and even cites him as an authority he accepts, sometimes he appears to be critical of Averroës, but even just to mention him by name was a daring act in Dante's day. Averroës was most famous, or rather infamous, for his understanding of the human soul, worked out in terms ultimately derived from Aristotle, the Possible and the Active Intellects. This subject is extremely complicated and obscure,24 deliberately so because of its dangerously unorthodox implications. At the risk of oversimplifying the matter, I will concentrate on Averroës's idea of the unity of the Possible Intellect, his paradoxical claim that all humanity shares a single intellect. The reasoning behind this strange idea goes something like this: when we think a rational truth, such as 2 + 2 = 4, we all think alike and in that sense participate in the same intellect. The key corollary of this idea is that insofar as we participate in the unity of the Possible Intellect, we also participate in its eternity. Thus Averroës could in effect say that our souls are eternal by virtue of apprehending eternal truths such as those of mathematics. In short, Averroës's conception of the Possible Intellect allowed him to speak of the immortality of the human soul without implying the survival of the individual soul after death. In talking of the unity of the Possible Intellect, he was basically coming up with a notion of species immortality for the human race.

The advantage of this understanding of the soul for Averroës is that it gave him a way of talking publicly about human immortality to placate religious authorities, while pointing to an esoteric meaning of**[End Page 145]** immortality in harmony with his real philosophic position, a view in which the only true form of immortality is philosophic thinking. In Averroës's understanding, as individual human beings we die, but our

thoughts may live on. This outcome is especially true for someone who writes his thoughts down in books, thus making it possible for later generations to react to them.25 Indeed, in the realm of the written word, philosophers can in effect converse with each other over the centuries, as Averroës did with Aristotle when he wrote his commentaries on the Greek philosopher's works. That is the sense in which for Averroës philosophers are immortal, living forever in the disputes to which their works give rise.

I want to stress that I am giving a radically clarified account of what Averroës meant in his analysis of the soul. To have been as clear himself about the concept would have defeated his purpose. But despite its obscurity, the idea of the unity of the Possible Intellect had great practical and moral implications. If all we have is a form of species immortality, then the actions or beliefs of individual human beings have no bearing on whether or not they will achieve eternal life. An anecdote from an early book on Aquinas shows that as abstruse as Averroës's doctrine of the Possible Intellect appears to be, somehow it filtered down to the level of the common man in the European Middle Ages. William of Tocco reports the case of a French soldier "who was unwilling to atone for his sins because, as he put it: 'If the soul of the blessed Peter is saved, I shall also be saved; for if we know by one intellect, we shall share the same destiny.'"26 Here we see why orthodox authorities in both the Muslim and the Christian worlds condemned Averroës, and why both Albertus Magnus and Aquinas specifically attacked his idea of the unity of the Possible Intellect.27

Given its importance and notoriety, it is therefore highly significant that the Possible Intellect is one of the ideas Dante picked up from Averroës.28 He refers to it in a significant, though of course obscure, passage in his political treatise,De Monarchia :

it is clear that man's basic capacity is to have a potentiality or power for being intellectual. And since this power can not be completely actualized in a single man or in any of the particular communities of men above mentioned, there must be a multitude in mankind through whom this whole power can be actualized. . With this judgment Averroës agrees in his commentary on [Aristotle's]De anima .29 [End Page 146]

I cannot overemphasize how daring it was for Dante to refer to Averroës by name in this passage. In discussing the Possible Intellect he was dealing with one of the most sensitive and inflammatory subjects in late medieval thought, and to bring up Averroës explicitly in this context was to wave a red flag in the face of Church authorities.30 It was in fact one of the principal reasons why Pope John XXII had De Monarchia burned in 1329 in Bologna and the Catholic Church officially placed it on its Index of Forbidden Books in 1554 (it was not removed until the nineteenth century, when the Averroist scare apparently had blown over).31 Dante employs the idea of the Possible Intellect precisely in Averroës's sense, suggesting that philosophers form a community of thought over the centuries, that the gradual perfection of human thought grows out of a conversation among philosophers over time. We see now how profoundly appropriate it is that Averroës be placed in Dante's Limbo. Limbo is precisely an allegorical representation of Averroës's idea of the Possible Intellect. The eternal

conversation of the philosophers in Dante's Limbo is a metaphor for what Averroës meant by the immortality of human thought. How far this metaphorical conception of immortality can be extended throughout theDivine Comedy is a profound question for the interpretation of Dante.