Dante's friends had hoped that domestic peace might console him for his irreparable loss, but he himself had rather sought for consolation in the study of philosophy and theology; and it befell him, he tells us, as one who in seeking silver strikes on gold—not, haply, without guidance from on high;—for he began to see many things as in a dream, and deemed that Dame Philosophy must needs be supreme![7]
But neither domestic nor literary cares and duties absorbed his energies. In late years he had begun to take an active part in the politics of his city, and was now fast rising to his true position as the foremost man of Florence and of Italy.
Thus, we see new interests and new powers rising in his life, but for a time the unity of that life was gone. While Beatrice lived Dante's whole being was centred in her, and she was to him the visible token of God's presence upon earth, the living proof of the reality and the beauty of things Divine, born to fill the world with faith and gentleness. But when she was gone, when other passions and pursuits disputed with her memory the foremost place in Dante's heart, it was as though he had lost the secret and the meaning of life, as though he had lost the guidance of Heaven, and was whirled helplessly in the vortex of moral, social, and political disorder which swept over his country. For Italian politics at this period form a veritable chaos of shifting combinations and entanglements, of plots and counterplots, of intrigue and treachery and vacillation, though lightened ever and again by gleams of noblest patriotism and devotion.
Yet Dante's soul was far too strong to be permanently overwhelmed. Gradually his philosophical reflections began to take definite shape. He felt the wants of his own life and of his country's life. He pierced down to the fundamental conditions of political and social welfare; and when human philosophy had begun to restore unity and concentration to his powers, then the sweet image of the pure maiden who had first waked his soul to love returned glorified and transfigured to guide him into the very presence of God. She was the symbol of Divine philosophy. She, and she only, could restore his shattered life to unity and strength, and the love she never gave him as a woman, she could give him as the protecting guardian of his life, as the vehicle of God's highest revelation.[8]
With his life thus strengthened and enriched, with a firm heart and a steady purpose, Dante Alighieri stood in the year 1300 at the helm of the State of Florence. And here accordingly it becomes necessary for us to dwell for a moment on some of the chief political forces with which he had to deal.
The two great factions of the Guelfs and Ghibellines were tearing the very heart of Italy; and without going into any detail, we must try to point out the central ideas of each party. The Ghibellines, then, appear to have represented an aristocratic principle of order, constantly in danger of becoming oppressive, while the Guelfs represented a democratic principle of progress, ever verging upon chaotic and unbridled licence. The Ghibellines longed for a national unity, resting on centralisation; the Guelfs aimed at a local independence which tended to national disintegration. The Ghibellines, regarding the German Empire as the heir and representative of the Empire of Rome, and as the symbol of Italian unity, espoused the Emperor's cause against the Pope, declared the temporal power independent of the spiritual, and limited the sphere of the priests entirely to the latter. The Guelfs found in the political action of the Pope a counterpoise to the influence of the Emperor; the petty and intriguing spirit of the politics of the Vatican made its ruler the natural ally of the disintegrating Guelfs rather than the centralising Ghibellines, and accordingly the Guelfs ardently espoused the cause of the Pope's temporal power, and often sought in the royal house of France a further support against Germany.
These broad lines, however, were constantly blurred and crossed by personal intrigue or ambition, by family jealousies, feuds, and rivalries, by unnatural alliances or by corruption and treachery.
Now Dante was by family tradition a Guelf. Florence too was nominally the head quarters of Guelfism, and Dante had fought bravely in her battles against the Ghibellines. But the more he reflected upon the sources of the evils by which Italy was torn, the more profoundly he came to distrust the unprincipled meddling of the greedy princes of the house of France in Italian politics, and the more jealously did he watch the temporal power of the Pope. Perhaps the political opinions he afterwards held were not as yet fully consolidated, but his votes and proposals—which we read with a strange interest in the city archives of Florence nearly six hundred years after the ink has dried—show that in 1300 he was at any rate on the highway to the conclusions he ultimately reached. And we may therefore take this occasion of stating what they were.
It appeared to Dante that Italy was sunk in moral, social, and political chaos, for want of a firm hand to repress the turbulent factions that rent her bosom; and that no hand except an Emperor's could be firm enough. The Empire of Rome was to him the most imposing and glorious spectacle offered by human history. God had guided Rome by miracles and signs to the dominion of the world that the world might be at peace.