Omai puoi giudicar di que' cotali
Ch'io accusai di sopra, e de' lor falli
Che son cagion di tutti i vostri mali.
L'uno al pubblico segno i gigli gialli
Oppone, e quel s'appropria l'altro a parte,
Sì ch'è forte a veder qual più si falli.
Faccian li Ghibellin, faccian lor arte
Sott'altro segno; chè mal segue quello
Sempre chi la giustizia e lui diparte.[77]

And though, as the victim of the Guelfs of Florence, he found refuge among Ghibelline princes, he had friends among Guelfs also. His steps and his tongue were free to the end. And in character and feeling, in his austerity, his sturdiness and roughness, his intolerance of corruption and pride, his strongly-marked devotional temper, he was much less a Ghibelline than like one of those stern Guelfs who hailed Savonarola.

But he had a very decided and complete political theory, which certainly was not Guelf; and, as parties then were, it was not much more Ghibelline. Most assuredly no set of men would have more vigorously resisted the attempt to realise his theory, would have joined more heartily with all immediate opponents—Guelfs, Black, White, and Green, or even Boniface VIII.,—to keep out such an emperor as Dante imagined, than the Ghibelline nobles and potentates.

Dante's political views were a dream; though a dream based on what had been, and an anticipation of what was, in part at least, to come. It was a dream in the middle ages, in divided and republican Italy, the Italy of cities—of a real and national government, based on justice and law. It was the dream of a real state. He imagined that the Roman empire had been one great state; he persuaded himself that Christendom might be such. He was wrong in both instances; but in this case, as in so many others, he had already caught the spirit and ideas of a far-distant future; and the political organisation of modern times, so familiar to us that we cease to think of its exceeding wonder, is the practical confirmation, though in a form very different from what he imagined, of the depth and farsightedness of those expectations which are in outward form so chimerical—"i miei non falsi errori."

He had studied the "infinite disorders of the world" in one of their most unrestrained scenes, the streets of an Italian republic. Law was powerless, good men were powerless, good intentions came to naught; neither social habits nor public power could resist, when selfishness chose to have its way. The Church was indeed still the salt of the nations; but it had once dared and achieved more; it had once been the only power which ruled them. And this it could do no longer. If strength and energy had been enough to make the Church's influence felt on government, there was a Pope who could have done it—a man who was undoubtedly the most wondered at and admired of his age, whom friend or foe never characterised, without adding the invariable epithet of his greatness of soul—the "magnanimus peccator,"[78] whose Roman grandeur in meeting his unworthy fate fascinated into momentary sympathy even Dante.[79] But among the things which Boniface VIII. could not do, even if he cared about it, was the maintaining peace and law in Italian towns. And while this great political power was failing, its correlative and antagonist was paralysed also. "Since the death of Frederic II.," says Dante's contemporary, "the fame and recollections of the empire were well-nigh extinguished."[80] Italy was left without government—"come nave senza nocchiero in gran tempesta"—to the mercies of her tyrants:

Che le terre d'Italia tutte piene
Son di tiranni, e un Marcel diventa
Ogni villan, che parteggiando viene.—Purg. 6.

In this scene of violence and disorder, with the Papacy gone astray, the empire debased and impotent, the religious orders corrupted, power meaning lawlessness, the well-disposed become weak and cowardly, religion neither guide nor check to society, but only the consolation of its victims—Dante was bold and hopeful enough to believe in the Divine appointment, and in the possibility, of law and government—of a state. In his philosophy, the institutions which provide for man's peace and liberty in this life are part of God's great order for raising men to perfection;—not indispensable, yet ordinary parts; having their important place, though but for the present time; and though imperfect, real instruments of His moral government. He could not believe it to be the intention of Providence, that on the introduction of higher hopes and the foundation of a higher society, civil society should collapse and be left to ruin, as henceforth useless or prejudicial in man's trial and training; that the significant intimations of nature, that law and its results, justice, peace, and stability, ought to be and might be realised among men, had lost their meaning and faded away before the announcement of a kingdom not of this world. And if the perfection of civil society had not been superseded by the Church, it had become clear, if events were to be read as signs, that she was not intended to supply its political offices and functions. She had taught, elevated, solaced, blessed, not only individual souls, but society; she had for a time even governed it: but though her other powers remained, she could govern it no longer. Failure had made it certain that, in his strong and quaint language, "Virtus authorizandi regnum nostræ mortalitatis est contra naturam ecclesiæ; ergo non est de numero virtutum suarum."[81] Another and distinct organisation was required for this, unless the temporal order was no longer worthy the attention of Christians.

This is the idea of the De Monarchia; and though it holds but a place in the great scheme of the Commedia, it is prominent there also—an idea seen but in a fantastic shape, encumbered and confused with most grotesque imagery, but the real idea of polity and law, which the experience of modern Europe has attained to.

He found in clear outline in the Greek philosophy, the theory of merely human society; and raising its end and purpose, "finem totius humanæ civilitatis," to a height and dignity which Heathens could not forecast, he adopted it in its more abstract and ideal form. He imagined a single authority, unselfish, inflexible, irresistible, which could make all smaller tyrannies to cease, and enable every man to live in peace and liberty, so that he lived in justice. It is simply what each separate state of Christendom has by this time more or less perfectly achieved. The theoriser of the middle ages could conceive of its accomplishment only in one form, as grand as it was impossible—a universal monarchy.

But he did not start from an abstraction. He believed that history attested the existence of such a monarchy. The prestige of the Roman empire was then strong. Europe still lingers on the idea, and cannot even yet bring itself to give up its part in that great monument of human power. But in the middle ages the Empire was still believed to exist. It was the last greatness which had been seen in the world, and the world would not believe that it was over. Above all, in Italy, a continuity of lineage, of language, of local names, and in part of civilisation and law, forbad the thought that the great Roman people had ceased to be. Florentines and Venetians boasted that they were Romans: the legends which the Florentine ladies told to their maidens at the loom were tales of their mother city, Rome. The Roman element, little understood, but profoundly reverenced and dearly cherished, was dominant; the conductor of civilisation, and enfolding the inheritance of all the wisdom, experience, feeling, art, of the past, it elevated, even while it overawed, oppressed, and enslaved. A deep belief in Providence added to the intrinsic grandeur of the empire a sacred character. The flight of the eagle has been often told and often sung; but neither in Livy or Virgil, Gibbon or Bossuet, with intenser sympathy or more kindred power, than in those rushing and unflagging verses in which the middle-age poet hears the imperial legislator relate the fated course of the "sacred sign," from the day when Pallas died for it, till it accomplished the vengeance of heaven in Judæa, and afterwards, under Charlemagne, smote down the enemies of the Church.[82]