Dante Alighieri: a giant of the West and a man for our times

Tuesday marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, the Florentine poet, politician and philosopher. Dante, or as we call him in Italian, il Sommo Poeta (the Supreme Poet), is most famously known for his role in establishing the use of vernacular in literature at a time when most poetry was written in Latin. While he was not the first to do so, this decision by Dante, along with that of his fellow Tuscans Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarca (together called the tre corone  –three crowns — of Italian literature), played a pivotal role in their native Tuscan dialect emerging as the modern-day standardised Italian language. Indeed, Dante called the language he wrote in ‘Italian’. Not long after, Geoffrey Chaucer also broke from the ‘Latin-only’ tradition and chose English as a suitable medium for his epic, Canterbury Tales.

Dante’s most famous work, La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), is widely considered the most important poetic work of the Middle Ages and provided much inspiration for Western art.

Like all the liberal arts, Italian Studies too has been afflicted by progressive dumbing-down and woke crusades. Having taught in the subject for a number of years at the University of Western Australia, I have seen this saddening development first hand. Where Dante and Boccaccio were once integral parts of a major in Italian, these days they receive seeming token attention.

Worse still, now Dante has been, as we say in Italian, strumentalizzato (exploited) by the wokerati. As part of the commemorations of Dante’s death in Australia, the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies, is offering a premiere screening of Dante as a tool for environmental healing, by Australian poet emeritus and “environmental activist” John Kinsella, to be hosted by the Dante Alighieri Society of South Australia, as part of its “Dante in Australian Literature and in Music” series.

As James Burnham points out in his Politics as Wish, Dante Alighieri was a globalist – he advocated a single, unified world state. Dante contradicted himself in believing that only a single unified political administration can check tyranny and give man freedom. Burnham criticized Dante’s political theology because:

1. Dante’s ultimate goal – of eternal salvation in heaven is meaningless since heaven exists outside space and time and has no bearing on political action
2. Dante’s lesser goal is the self-fulfillment of all men is utopian and impossible.
3. Dante’s argument is academic and consist of pointless metaphysical and logical distinctions, distorted analogies, appeals to miracles and impractical. To Burhnam, Dante’s book De Monarahia The Monarchy is totally worthless.

But Burhnam pointed out that most books of the Middle Ages were written to esoterically to disguise their real meaning. As such we cannot take Dante’s words at face value but must be understood contextually. The real meaning of The Monarchy is the class struggle between The White Party (Guelphs) and The Black Party (Ghibellines). The Blacks were the party of the Papacy, the Ghibellines the Party of Empire. The purpose of the White Party was to block the advance of Empire.

Dante himself was a pharmacist who affiliated with the Knowledge Class of Ghibellines. The real meaning of Dante’s The Monarchy, was merely propagandistic defense of the Ghibelline Party Platform disguised as being pro-Pope. Both factions opposed the Burgher Class of merchants who wanted less war, commercial prosperity, and a politics of law instead of personal privilege. Dante was an infiltrator and traitor that espoused rotten politics disguised as poetry.

Read Burnham here
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/08/james-burnhams-dante-politics-as-wish/

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