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[ 106 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
show the poverty of philosophy and science as intellectual activities. He felt that
instead of wasting one’s time studying philosophy or science, intellectuals should
focus on revelation, develop theories of morality, and lead good lives.
Portrait of an Age
Aquinas’s
Summa Theologica
i s generally considered the greatest synthesis of
philosophy and theology in the High Middle Ages. But it is dry as dust, even in
its account of such potentially juicy topics as the afterlife. It took Dante Alighieri
(1265-1321), in the
Divine Comedy , to depict poetically the implications of Aquinas’s
view and thereby to nourish the imaginations of educated Christians.
The events Dante depicts are supposed to take place on Good Friday, in the
year 1300. On that day, in his poem, he travels through hell, purgatory, and
heaven, at first guided by Virgil, the great Latin poet, and then by Beatrice,
a Florentine woman for whom he wrote
the love poems presented in his
Vita
Nuova
and whose seemingly meaningless early death led him to think deeply
about the afterlife. Virgil resides in limbo, the outer circle of hell, where virtuous
pagans and innocent unbaptized infants reside. He guides Dante not only
through limbo and hell but also through purgatory, all of which are within or on
the earth. Beatrice, depicted as an exalted saint, then guides Dante through
heaven itself, which is located above the earth, in concentric circles, consistent
with Aquinas’s synthesis of Aristotelian cosmology and Christian theology.
Like Aquinas, Dante believed that philosophy and theology, though independent
of each other, should reach the same truths. Unlike Aquinas, he did not believe that
they should reach these truths in common pursuit, with theology the more
foundational science and religious faith the final arbiter. More like Siger than
Aquinas, Dante felt that philosophy must pursue truth using its own methods,
independent of those used by theologians, for whom the truths of philosophy must
be made consistent with Christian revelation.
Dante’s views on this issue were determined in part by his views on the ideal
relation of political authority and the church presented in his De Monarchia. Based
on his own experience of being an outcast from his home in Florence, which was
under papal authority, he insisted that earthly political authority resided in the
emperor, not the pope, whose role should be restricted entirely to revelation and to
individual salvation. Probably because of his strong views on the independence of
church and state, as well as of philosophy and religion, Dante, in his poem, places
Siger next to Aquinas, with Albert, Aquinas’s teacher, on the other side, in the fourth
circle of heaven.
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