The Politic Atheist: Dante on Machiavelli

Copyright 2007 © Alex Binz
Do not reprint or quote without permission by the author

 

Though today celebrated as the ‘founder of political science,’ there was hardly another in Europe more demonized than Niccolò Machiavelli in life. The British, in fact, adopted his name as a sobriquet for Satan: ‘Old Nick.’ As the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote: “We doubt whether any name in literary history be so generally odious as that of [Machiavelli]… Out of his surname [the English] have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil” (Macaulay 2). Machiavelli’s individualistic vision of Prince and principate proved too radical for even his humanist contemporaries. His writings ran contrary to both the moral and political foundations of Western culture. Just as he rejected the ethics of Christ, Machiavelli also rejected the medieval vision of politics, inherited from Aristotle through the poet Dante. Yet Dante had anticipated Machiavelli; for, while a theoretical defense of realpolitik was new, the practice of it certainly was not. Dante’s allegory in the Inferno portrays hell as the perversion of the ideal state, founded on the same self-serving ambition that would define Machiavelli. Dante’s archetype of politics denies Machiavelli’s model, and thus serves as an effective critique for it. Dante ultimately posits that Machiavelli’s approach to leadership fails, as it lacks both realism and idealism.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that politics is the highest endeavor of man.

 

Politics makes use of the other sciences, and also lays down what we should do and from what we should refrain, [thus] its end must theirs; and this end must be the good for man…. For while it is desirable to secure what is good in the case of an individual, to do so in the case of a people or a state is something finer and more sublime. Such then, is the aim of our investigation; and it is a kind of political science (Aristotle 1094a-b).

 

Dante echoes this Aristotelian definition of politics in his Commedia, especially in the Inferno, where he damns the leaders who abandoned this idealistic conception. For those in the High Middle Ages, politics was seen as the worthiest of human arts, for it was the intellectual pursuit of the general good.

Machiavelli utterly rejects this idealistic definition of politics. As he wrote in the Prince, “A prince, therefore, should have no other object, no other thought, no other subject of study than war, its rules and disciplines…. The quickest way to lose a state is to neglect this art; the quickest way to get one is to study it” (Machiavelli 40). For Machiavelli, then, the end of politics lay not in the general good but in the survival of the state; likewise, the art of politics was solely concerned with attaining and maintaining power. Machiavelli’s counsel to princes is strikingly similar to Nietzsche’s prescriptions to the ‘super-man’ (ubër-menschen): abandon virtue, let ‘excellence’ slide; concern yourself only with the ‘will to power.’ Whereas Aristotle treated politics as the fulfillment of ethics, and ethics a mere introduction to politics, Machiavelli totally divorced the two fields of study.

Machiavelli further rejected the medieval concept of hierarchy, which placed leadership in a much broader framework of authority. St. Benedict, in his Rule, outlined a chain of political authority, of which the abbot (the head of his monastic communities) was but a small part.  After all, humans cannot be supreme, for that is reserved for God. Thus, just as subordinates ought to take direction from human leaders, those leaders must obey the commands of God. Machiavelli sought to overthrow this medieval hierarchy. In a revealing passage, Machiavelli writes that “it is better to be rash than timid, for Fortune is a woman, and the man who wants to hold her down must beat and bully her” (69). In the Middle Ages, Fortune was treated almost as a goddess—an instrument of God to govern nature. As Dante wrote, “He who made all of Heaven’s features/in His transcendent wisdom gave them guides.... Fortune, like any other god, foresees/judges, and rules her appointed realm”—which was over “goods/of worldly splendor” (Dante VII.64-77). To subjugate Lady Fortune—as Machiavelli urged the Prince—would be to force divine authority to yield to that of a mere man. This was a heretical turn from the medieval vision: ‘true’ leadership no longer submitted itself to God within the cosmic order, but sought to overturn that hierarchy and create another over which it might rule.

The High Middle Ages lacked one such as Machiavelli, to explicitly endorse this political obsession. Yet there were many to practice it. In the Inferno, Dante damned all such practitioners of realpolitik, sending even popes to the nether regions of Hell. Pope Nicholas III explains his crime to the poet: “[V]ested with the great/mantle of power… I longed so much to advance/the cubs [orsatti—a pun on Nicholas’s family name, Orsini] that filling my purse was my great aim” (XIX.63-66). Dante responds: “Stay where you’re held/for these are your deservèd punishments/ …Avarice like yours distributes grief, /afflicting the world by trampling on the good/and raising the wicked” (XIX.91-99). Dante saw such selfish pursuit of power as damnable indeed; in fact, it provides his definition of damnation. In Canto III, Dante observes this inscription on the gates of Hell: “Through me you enter into the city of woes” (III.1). In later canzons, Dante allegorizes Heaven as an ideal political hierarchy. Here, the Inferno provides its antithesis: the inversion of a divine city-state following Aristotelian idealism. By reversing the medieval order of justice and neglecting the proper duties of classical leadership, pre-Machiavellians such as Nicholas III provided the form for Dante’s depiction of Hell.

In this way Dante pre-empted Machiavelli’s defense of realpolitik, and countered it with a dose of Christian idealism. Likewise, his Inferno also anticipated the ideal leader envisioned in the Prince. Machiavelli asserted that excellent leadership required a degree of shrewdness, for “a prince may not have all the admirable qualities [of Christian virtue], but it is very necessary that he should seem to have them” (48). Like Plato’s “unjust man,” Machiavelli’s prince “must be perfect in his wickedness; he must be able to commit the greatest crimes perfectly and still get himself a reputation for the highest probity” (Plato 361a). In the Inferno, Dante discovers his former teacher—Brunetto Latini—in the eighth circle of Hell. Distraught, he cries out: “Could I have everything for which I long/you would not still endure this banishment/away from human nature…. Your image—dear, fatherly, benevolent—/being fixed inside my memory, has imbued /my heart” (XV.75-80). Like Machiavelli’s prince, Ser Brunetto Latini maintained an appearance of goodness, and even deceives Dante the pilgrim. Yet Dante the poet dooms Brunetto to eternal isolation, as he must flee from “new souls” (XV.115). Both the practice and practitioner of Machiavellian politics are summarily rejected.

In the Inferno, Dante denounces realpolitik as ultimately myopic, for ignoring the eternal consequences of Machiavellian policies. But he condemns realpolitik on standards of realism as well. In Canto VI, Dante encounters the glutton Ciacco, who prophesies concerning Florence: “Only two men of all/are truly just—whose words the rest ignore/for the triple sparks of envy, greed, and pride/ignite their hearts” (VI.66-69). Later, Brunetto Latini counsels Dante: “The world’s old saying is that these are blind: /a people greedy, envious, proud—see fit/to cleanse their habits from yourself” (XV.62-64). These same qualities—“envy, greed, and pride”—are set in conflict with political justice, then dismissed as blindness. This is not original to Dante; in the Republic, Plato sets out to “prove… that justice is superior to injustice… because of its inherent effects on its possessor” (Plato 367e). For Plato, as for Dante, only the just man has full use of his reason and can be thus truly successful.

Machiavellian shrewdness—assume that others are purely vicious and act so yourself—can blind a prince to the virtue of genuine leadership. As Professor Hundert criticized the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahunte in The Emperor’s Club: “Great ambition and conquest without contribution is without significance.” Worse than insignificant; Dante considered it damnable. “In the world above, how many a self-deceiver/now counting himself a mighty king will sprawl/swinelike amid the mire when life is over” (VIII.46-48). Dante’s Inferno is a political allegory, defending the Aristotelian idealism which the Prince later reviled. Despite the incongruity of time, Dante can still function as an effective critic of Machiavelli. He brings medieval idealism and classical realism alike to bear in his condemnation of realpolitik, and argues that Machiavelli is ultimately myopic in matters both eternal and temporal.

Works Cited

 

Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno. Trans. Robert Pinsky. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1994

Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. J. Thomson. New York: Penguin Books, 2004 [1955].

Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “On Machiavelli.” English Essays: Sidney to Macauley. Ed. Charles W. Eliot. Harvard Classics. Vol. 27. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14. 51 vols.  Bartleby.com. 10 Apr. 2001. <http://www.bartleby.com/27/24.html> 14 May 2007.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Trans. Robert Adams. New York: Norton, 1992.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin Books, 2003 [1955].

Saint Benedict of Nursia. The Rule of St. Benedict. Trans. Anthony Miesel and M.L. del Mastro. New York: Doubleday, 1975.


The Emperor’s Club. Dir. Michael Hoffman. Beacon Communications. 2002.