Divine Providence: A History 9781628926750, 9781441112705

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Acknowledgments The gratitude I owe can never compensate for the generosity I have enjoyed while writing this study. I must start with three wonderful professors at the University of San Francisco, John Elliott, eminent biblical scholar, Hamilton Hess, patristics scholar, and Frank Buckley, SJ, who together taught me strategies in historical and exegetical reading that I had not encountered previously. I can never thank them enough for their patience, learning, encouragement, and spirited conversations. Another enormous debt is to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the sponsor for the Dante Seminar at Stanford in 1988, which enabled me to reengage with Dante after a long hiatus. The seminar led by Professor Rachel Jacoff, with Professors Peter Hawkins, Jeffrey Schnapp, Kevin Brownlee, and William Stephany, and guest lectures by Professor John Freccero stands out as one of the most stimulating intellectual experiences of my entire academic career. Further gratitude is due to the NEH for a research fellowship in 1994–95, which gave me a year in Rome to write Dante and the Orient, and to begin research for this study. Another fellowship in 1999–2000, this time from the PEW Foundation, made possible additional work on this study. I was also fortunate to meet up with Professor Hayden White, who directed me to the works on historical theories that would prove essential for grappling with the intellectual issues that affect its writing and interpretation. More recently, and several books later, I was able to return to the topic, while working on another project at the National Humanities Center. There I was able to begin secondary research on the Commedia crucial to this study. For this, I thank the splendid librarians at the Center: Jean Houston, Betsy Dain, and Head Librarian Eliza Robertson. At the National Humanities Center, I also met Professors Joel Markus and Elizabeth Clark, both of whom gave generously of their wisdom. Professor Clark read an early version of the introduction, and bluntly said that it needed work, an honest and correct appraisal for which I am deeply grateful. I also benefited from the dedication of several research assistants including Andrew Matt, PhD, whose sharp eye catches every infelicity; Monica Powers, a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, without whose stellar work in collecting library resources I could never have moved forward; and finally,

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Kristopher Ide, who spent the summer checking references with a vigilant eye for my many errors. I would be deeply remiss if I did not also thank my home institution, University of California Davis, whose generous support makes it possible for fellowship recipients to dedicate an entire academic year to research. Readers, colleagues, collaborators, and teachers without whose help I would be utterly adrift include my friend and colleague in Comparative Literature at UC Davis, Professor Juliana Schiesari; Professor Albert Ascoli, one of the most careful readers I know; Professor Brian Stock, whose Augustine seminar I took at UC Berkeley; Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta, spontaneous and generous reader, interlocutor, and brilliant intellect; and Professor Peter Hawkins, without whose steadfast encouragement and insights this study would not have been finished. Finally, once again, I must express my deepest appreciation to my husband and world-class editor, Bob Schildgen, whose breadth of learning enables him to ask the most difficult questions and even to make me uneasy about my ideas, while also relentlessly clarifying my prose.

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List of Primary Texts Alighieri, Dante. Il Convivio. Ed. G. Busnelli and G. Vandelli. 2 vols Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1954. Dante’s Il Convivio (The Banquet). Trans. Richard Lansing. New York: Garland, 1990. La Divina Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. Giorgio Petrocchi. 4 vols Società dantesca italiana. Milan: Mondarori, 1966–7. The Divine Comedy. Trans. and commentary Charles S. Singleton. Bollingen Series 80. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–6. Monarchia. Ed. and trans. Prue Shaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. La Vita Nuova. Ed. Domenico de Robertis. Milan: Ricciardi, l980. De Vulgari Eloquentia. Ed. and trans. Steven Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l996. Augustine. Confessionum Libri XIII. Ed. Martin Skutella. CCSL 27. Turnhout: Brepols, 1961. Augustine. De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos. Libri I–X. Ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb. CCSL 47. Turnhout: Brepols, 1955. Augustine. De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos. Libri XI–XXII. Ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb. CCSL 48. Turnhout: Brepols, 1955. Augustine. De Doctrina Christiana. Ed. Joseph Martin in CCSL 32. Turnhout: Brepols, 1962. Augustine. Retractionum Libri II. Ed. Almut Mutzenbecher in CCSL 57. Turnhout: Brepols, 1984. Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem I and II. Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelstalt, l969. Livy in Fourteen Volumes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. vols 1–5, trans. B. O. Foster. vols 6–8. Trans. F. G. Moore. vols 9–11. Trans. Evan T. Sage. vol. 12. Trans. Evan T. Sage and A. C. Schlesinger. vol. 13. Trans. A. C. Schlesinger. vol. 14. Trans. A. C. Schlesinger. General index by and Russel M. Geer.

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Orosio. Le Storie Contro I Pagani. 2 vols Ed. Adolf Lippold. Trans. Aldo Bartalucci. Verona: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1998. Virgil. Opera. Ed. R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969; rept. 1972.

Translations The Oxford Study Bible. Revised English Bible with Apocrypha. Ed. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfield, James R. Mueller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Saint Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Betteson. Intro. G. R. Evans. London: Penguin Books, 1972. Saint Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin Books, 1961. Saint Augustine. On Christian Doctrine. Trans. D. W. Roberston, Jr, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1958. Orosius. The Seven Books of History Against the Pagans. Trans. Roy J. Deferrari. Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of American Press, 1964. Vergil. The Aeneid Trans. Sarah Ruden. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

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Introduction: The Idea of Divine Providence in Orosius, Augustine, and Dante

A young priest fleeing the invasions in Iberia in the early fifth century came to visit a history-hardened North African bishop, and then went on, according to his own testimony, to write History Against the Pagans because the Bishop of Hippo, Augustine (354–430 CE), had asked him to do so. Combining secular with sacred history and adopting the idea that Rome was the world from the Roman historian Livy (59 BCE–17 CE), Orosius (c.375–c.418 CE) created what would become the dominant Latin western theory of the role of divine providence in human history.1 Building from his Roman precursors, the Bible, and the fourth-century Christian apologists, Lactantius (240–320 CE)2 and Eusebius (263–339 CE),3 Orosius’ History recounts a story of victory over the forces of darkness even as the Empire is destabilized after the 410 attack of the Visigoth Alaric (370–410 CE). Thus, in Orosius, we find the notion that the past is not only the source of lessons, and that, as in Livy, it has a moral purpose, but that it also prepares for the present in which a new historical “epoch” triumphs.4 Although he does not discuss Orosius, R. G. Collingwood’s argument that Christian historiography could be divided into four categories, universal, providential, apocalyptic (based on the idea that Christ’s birth separates history into two distinct parts), and epochal or period history, characterizes Orosius’ concepts of destined history, as realized in the Christian Roman Empire.5 This theory inspired medieval histories and political theories, versions of which have continued into the modern era in various secularized forms. In exploring the genealogy of the idea of providential or destined history as an organizing principle for understanding the divine purpose for humans, this study examines the ancient and late antique uses and deliberations on destined history to follow these ideas as explored by Dante. The theories of Christian politics and history that Orosius and Augustine produced were carried over in the first and second millennia as was also their understanding of how the history of the late Roman Empire connects to God’s plan for humankind. As

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backgrounds for Dante’s own positions in the Monarchia and the Commedia, this study explores how the Bible, ancient Roman writers of the first century, Orosius, and Augustine deliberate on the divine purpose in history.6 This basic idea of providential or destined history has many precedents and has evolved into many versions, including the Roman concept of “destiny,” the Hebrew scripture notion of the covenant between God and his chosen people, and the Christian Empire of Lactantius, Eusebius, and Orosius, as well as its modern secular versions in Napoleon, Hegel, or Marx. Marx abolished the divine and replaced it with an explanation of history based on the class struggle and its inexorable evolution. The advocates of Manifest Destiny in the United States in the nineteenth century were applying a secularized version of divine providence to their justification for American expansionism. The concept of American exceptionalism emerges from similar secular premises, as do Marxist visions of a utopia destined to emerge from class struggle. Thus, one can argue that the religious explanations of destiny and providence remain deeply embedded in modern secular understanding of historical reality, the latest being the faith in “the march of progress,” specifically technological innovation that will shape our destiny and the future itself, solving all worldwide problems of poverty, disease, environmental degradation, and homelessness. In these examples, the “taken for granted” is the idea of natural evolution toward a triumphal progress that will culminate in this mythologized “end of history.”7 Augustine differed profoundly with Orosius on the legacy of Rome and the place and responsibility of humans within the temporal order. Thus, the two represent divergent views on the role of divine providence in human governance. Augustine, who begins the City of God after the 410 CE sack of Rome, absolutely rejects the idea that any land or place (and therefore political history) is permanently blessed with moral or material superiority to any other: all kingdoms are potential Babylons, all rulers potential pirates. Therefore, he writes at the beginning of the City of God and repeats in Retractions (430 CE) that because worship of the Christian God is being blamed for the sack of Rome, one of his purposes is to refute those who argue that the vicissitudes of history can be ascribed to any god or gods (Retr. 2.69). Separating secular from sacred history, Augustine sets out to disentangle the divine purpose from temporal history, whether of Rome or any other temporal history. Dante develops his own theory of providential history. Exiled from his home because of the political fractiousness plaguing Europe and the Italian peninsula,

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in particular—the political and military battle of the allies of the papal party and supporters of the imperial party (Guelfs versus Ghibellines)—he writes when the papal court has moved to Avignon in 1305. With the death of Henry VII (1313), and the simultaneous demise of any ambition for a restored Roman Empire, Dante still clings to the idea of a unified Europe under a single temporal ruler. Following his preferred historian, Orosius, Dante in Convivio (4.4. 8–12) supported the legitimacy of the Roman Empire, and in the Monarchia, he argued that the Romans had gained the Empire by “divine providence” (Monarchia 2.1. 4–7). Also in the Monarchia and Letters, he appears to ignore, obliquely contest, or deliberately obscure Augustine’s arguments in the City of God. In the Commedia, however, Dante adheres to the idea of Roman destiny while at the same time lamenting the current institutional and moral crises with an apocalyptic urgency that recalls Augustine’s questions about any potential for redemption of the temporal order. Thus Dante, writing at a time of the decadence or collapse of many political and ecclesiastical institutions, adheres to an Orosian view, particularly in the Monarchia, but the Commedia’s dark view of human intractability raises questions about how faithful he remained to the providential view of human or secular history. Holding divine intervention, destiny, or providence responsible for political and military success and failure indeed has a long history in western thought and letters. Canonized in the Bible, celebrated in Virgil and Livy, this view is central to Orosius’ History. However, we can also find profound challenges to this idea of a divinely orchestrated rise and fall of dynasties in the Bible as well as in pagan Roman and Christian authors in the later Roman Empire. Of the canon of texts about the founding of new nations that were Dante’s sources, models, and challenges, on the one hand, we have Exodus, Judges, and 1 and 2 Kings (more particularly for the Hebrew people), and for the Latin West, we find Virgil’s Aeneid and Orosius’ History. Together these works show gods, Yahweh, or the Christian God busy intervening on behalf of the destined or chosen people and promising lands and triumph in battles. But, on the other hand, within the same traditions, Ecclesiastes, Job, the Hebrew prophets, Psalms, for example, as well as Lucan’s Pharsalia,8 Macrobius’s Commentary on the “Dream of Scipio,”9 and Augustine’s City of God, all in their unique ways call into question these notions of divinely orchestrated political and military triumph. Thus, in framing this argument about a providential theory of history, I am assuming, following Charles Taylor’s formulation, based as he says, on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Polanyi, that “beliefs are held within a context or

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a framework of the ‘taken-for-granted,’ which usually remains tacit, and may even be as yet unacknowledged by the agent, because never formulated.”10 Many others, most notably Hans-Georg Gadamer, have adopted similar formulas about tacit presuppositions.11 However, even if the idea of providential or destined history, based on the Bible or Virgil (and the legacy of the Roman Empire), came to occupy a “taken for granted” position, the salient aspect is that, writing at critical moments in history, the three main authors treated here (Orosius, Augustine, and Dante) actually engaged in a conscious effort to draw attention to the “taken for granted,” to challenge its assumptions, and to shape and reform these prevailing but tacit attitudes. The authoritative role of the Bible, whether in Orosius, Augustine, or Dante, informs how the idea of providential history unfolds as a working political theory. The Bible and the various views of history it represents occupy a central place in the discussion here, even though different hermeneutical entry points (i.e. the context of redactors and readers/interpreters) into the biblical texts lead to radically divergent readings. Thus, this argument evaluates how interpretive methods and underlying beliefs and attitudes contribute to shaping the reading of historical events as redacted in sacred or canonical texts. In doing so, the argument associates itself with theoretical debates about history (as in, e.g. Michel de Certeau, Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Hans Georg-Gadamer, Roger Chartier, or Paul Ricoeur) that probe the assumptions that inform the initial writing of literary-history texts and the role of epistemologies in how these texts have been received over a long time span.12

Authority “Authoritative sources” in this discussion refers to textual authority that may emanate from individual, institutional, or corporate power that is followed or assumed by the writer or text, and later conferred or reenforced by external or other authorities.13 Following the formula of Ernst Robert Curtius, for the period from ancient Rome to the fourteenth century, there were three legitimating authorities: studium or school, imperium or state, and sacerdotium, the Church.14 Other systems of authority also operate in the writers discussed here. For example, power (and therefore authority) claimed from a transcendent divinity characterizes how the Bible writers interpret and present their narratives. The assumed or presumed prophetic knowledge or command over their subject

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matter may also legitimate the writers’ authority over the particular subjects addressed in their works. The writings of Virgil, Orosius, Augustine, and Dante acquired authority because of the authors’ social and/or cultural status when living, and more importantly as a result of the subsequent cultural and institutional reception of their works, they acquired the authority of studium, imperium, or sacerdotium. Authority may also emanate from the use the writers make of antecedent texts because these texts had long been used to legitimate actions and sustain beliefs about what is tacit, or taken for granted: thus, Orosius, Augustine, and Dante engage in debates with authorities like the Bible and its various authors or the works of Virgil and Livy because of the particular cultural status of their works. As authorities, the works provide later writers the resources to support and debate positions or to express controversial differences. Because authors or literary texts acquire normative validity through the expressed judgment of others, the works discussed here may also possess yet another type of authority because they have been recognized as “canonical,” and therefore have claims to an attention conferred by centuries of such recognition. Dante, unlike the Bible, Virgil, Orosius, or Augustine, claims authority for the positions he adopts, even though in actual fact, his political arguments were certainly neither representative nor received as authoritative.15 Ascribing authority to divine forces that operate in history, the authors and texts discussed here acquired a parallel kind of authoritative power over the unfolding of western literary and political history through their influence on later thinkers and on cultural and social decision-makers. For example, Virgil, particularly his Aeneid, and the Bible have occupied central spaces in western European reading, and therefore have possessed the power and authority, whether tacitly or deliberately, to contribute to the formation of what one might call “western consciousness,” that in turn influences political and social attitudes and practices, in addition to Europe’s literary traditions.16 As scholars have recognized, from the end of the ancient world to the fifteenth century, the western Latin world interpreted history from the often contradictory viewpoints of Augustine and Orosius, as the two most authoritative figures for historical understanding.17 Augustine, as one of the major Latin Fathers of the Church, is the single most important figure in the intellectual and cultural life of the Middle Ages. Augustine’s works, including the Confessions, served as an authoritative resource for all the major writers in the millennium that followed him, from Gregory the Great to Dante, Luther, and Calvin. Indeed his influence

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on Renaissance and Reformation thought cannot be overestimated. If anything, the Reformation actually amplified Augustine’s influence. It would be impossible to imagine Luther and Calvin without the imprint of Augustine, even if they exaggerated his views. Both Augustine’s and Orosius’ works were continuously read in private tutorial education, in schools, at studia, or later in universities, from the end of the Empire to the early modern period. Their authority was so persistent that the standard medieval encyclopedias, including Isidore of Seville (570–636 CE),18 Rhabanus Maurus (b. ca. 776–d. 856 CE),19 and Vincent of Beauvais (b. c. 1184–1194–d.1264 CE),20 use both the pagan Roman and the later Latin Christian writers as primary sources to retell the history of the Romans as integral to the history of Christianity.21 A figure like Orosius may seem inconsequential today, but in that long period when western European institutions, social structures, and organizing epistemologies were evolving from ancient to medieval forms to produce modern western political, legal, and social institutions,22 Orosius, among others, provided the basis for knowledge of a host of topics from geography to history and theology. The legacy of Orosius and Augustine, in different intellectual and political packaging, affects modern societies to this day.

History and fiction The works examined here may be religious, literary, historical, philosophical, or theological because a wide variety of texts must be examined to fully grasp the genealogy of an idea used to explain the processes of history and the divine and human roles in them. To explore this idea in these authoritative texts (the Bible and Virgil and Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, Orosius’ History, and Augustine’s City of God), all of which were written at critical moments in history, I presuppose that all the works examined advance a historical argument, whether they expressly write history, like Livy and Orosius, or like Augustine, who treats history, philosophy, and theology, or Virgil and Dante, who write poetry, or the Hebrew Bible in its multiple genres, which presents itself as the history of a people. As texts that deliberate on history, they are often written in response to specific historical events that may well be distinct from the events addressed within the works. Indeed, they understand the facts of history through specific interpretive strategies that reevaluate past events according to their own unique contemporary historical situation and ideological, philosophical, or theological intentions.

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Because this study focuses on works of history, literature, theology, philosophy, as well as sacred narrative, where we find the idea of divine providence, the role of narrative in historical understanding and the connection between history and fiction also inform the discussion. The last 40 years have witnessed considerable intellectual controversy about history and historiography and the relationship between literature and history. The idea that history as an empirical science had or could establish objective truths about the past has been profoundly challenged, and history as narrative, or the “emplotment” of human actions, has found new respect. Traditional history writing has been questioned, for example, by Hayden White, who in Metahistory argued that history is organized by a “poetics of history,” in which the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony serve to “emplot” the narratives of historical events.23 Michel Foucault’s probing of how social practices that themselves are never called into question contribute to constructing an assumed reality has led to interest in hidden histories, prompted by what he called an “insurrection of subjugated knowledge.”24 Thus micro-histories, the histories of the subaltern including, for example, suppressed people, women’s history, histories of the colonized and exploited, histories of minorities and exiles, or the historical lives of peasants rather than those of kings and rulers became the subjects of inquiry. These works attempt to discover the stories of ordinary people and vernacular or popular cultures hidden by the long tradition of grand narrative historiography. One consequence of this approach has been to obscure the fact that canonical works themselves might represent an “insurrection of subjugated knowledge.” A canonical work today may have been sidelined when it was composed or even in its reception history. Thus, important as discovering long-ignored facets of human history, and therefore filling in important gaps in our historical understanding has been, we have simultaneously tended to ignore how writers who have been received as canonical or authoritative may themselves have confronted historical lapses or grand presuppositions. Certainly Augustine in the City of God was addressing what he deemed hegemonic historical assumptions as epitomized by the triumphalist rhetoric of the Roman Empire. The increasing scrutiny and suspicion of history as an empirical social science during this period led to a simultaneous acknowledgment that history is a literary practice. In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur argues that history is a narrative, but it is a narrative that reconfigures action that must take place in time.25 Brian Stock suggests that it is medievalists who have contributed the most to “reviving a formal inquiry into relations between literary and historical

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dimensions of culture,” partially because medieval texts do not assume a rigid division between the two fields.26 Gadamer’s position that all historical studies are ultimately teleological assumes that there may be “no necessity, knowable a priori at work in history” but that “the structure of historical continuity is still a teleological one.”27 Thus, because history writing follows a linear narrative trajectory, its organization implies that events unfold sequentially even if only by coincidence and not by causation. Thus, when telling a history, the writer has to choose a beginning and an end, therefore adopting a teleology and using storytelling or narrative strategies. The writer’s underlying beliefs determine the choice of beginnings and endings. When Livy or Eusebius focus on the history of Rome or the history of the Church, the choice of the subject reveals an ideological commitment. When the canonists compiled the catena of disparate texts of the Hebrew Bible into a specific chronological order that was disconnected from their initial time of composition (not to mention from various times of redaction and other editorial interventions), they created a narrative sequence, a history of the Hebrew people. When Augustine sets out to describe the city of God in contrast to the city of man, he is already committed to a hermeneutics of history. In these examples, the understanding of the historical events then unfolds in how the redactors or authors organize and arrange their narratives and the particular positions they adopt to interpret the meaning of historical events. Michel de Certeau attempts to straddle the fiction-social science dichotomous view of history, by writing, Western historiography struggles against fiction. This internecine strife between history and storytelling is very old. Like an old family quarrel, positions and opinions are often fixed. In its struggle against genealogical storytelling, the myths and legends of the collective memory, and the meanderings of the oral tradition, historiography establishes a certain distance between itself and common assertion and belief; it locates itself in this difference, which gives it the accreditation of erudition because it is separated from ordinary discourse.28

For de Certeau, although history is indeed literary, it nonetheless produces factual and scientific information, even if it is only in the same way as fiction does.29 This is not a wholly new argument for we can find defenses of it in the ancient Greco-Roman period and in the writers examined here. A discussion of history and historiography needs to take into account the fact that myth and history frequently work in tandem in the ancient world.30 Nonetheless, a dichotomy emerged by the time of Plato that could clearly lead to a distinction that would make the “myths” of others false and one’s own true.

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About this Platonic notion of truth, Michel Foucault writes, “A division emerged between Hesiod and Plato, separating true discourse from false; it was a new division for henceforth, true discourse was no longer considered precious and desirable, since it had ceased to be discourse linked to the exercise of power.”31 He refers here to the stripping of the power of Homeric myths and legends as history. That some epistemological distinction between fact and fable, truth and falsity, and history and myth was emerging in the literary production of the fifth century BCE in Greece, due to the increasing impact of literacy and a literate consciousness, hardly needs proving.32 Collingwood identified this period as the first “great crisis” in the history of European historiography, “when the idea of history as a science . . . came into being.”33 True history became factual and true discourse philosophy, when Plato made the old false myths a form of poetry that preserves community memories, thus functioning as “an instrument of tradition,”34 or the “taken for granted.” Intellectually, a distinction between myth and history emerged. It is most evident in Thucydides, who in dividing the true from the mythical invented a space for “history” as truth even if the epithet “first real historian” has proven to be an overstatement.35 Thucydides’ work, which is rooted in literate culture, may indeed have been, as Bernard Williams reminded us, “the commencement of real history.”36 Recognizing that Thucydides’ work is at once the effect of an “austere objectivity” and of art that structures the story, Williams nonetheless argued that the historian’s primary interest is to “tell the truth about the past.”37 It is this fact that situates Thucydides’ approach to the past as “historical” and “objective” as opposed to “local,” as in Herodotus.38 Williams argued that “historical time provides a rigid and determinate structure of the past,” in contrast to myth and legend in which no specificity of time is provided. Thus, he argues, this specificity of time is tied to the idea of historical truth, to which Thucydides subscribes.39 However, the problem with this argument that the historical “constructivists” raise is that because these facts of the past must be arranged, organized, and narrated, and are informed by particular viewpoints, the imagination enters into the writing of history; empirical facts and specific times once established must be made into narrative to become history, and this act of arranging introduces the fictional imagination into the history-writing enterprise.40 In Latin culture or the ancient Roman world of letters, the philological/ linguistic distinction between myth and history is very clear. A “mythicus” is a writer of fables or myths, a “mythistoria,” a fabulous narrative, and in late Latin, “mythologia” is what post-Enlightenment thinkers call mythology. In contrast,

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according to Cicero, “historia” is a narrative of past events, and Herodotus therefore the father of history,41 and for Quintilian, Sallust is a major historical author,42 who became Augustine’s chosen historian, even though the learned doctor also treats Virgil’s Aeneid as history.43 Yet, despite the epistemological distinction drawn between history and myth, in fact, as Erich Auerbach argued in his analysis of mimetic principles in literature, “antique historiography gives us neither social history nor economic history nor cultural history.” Contrasting passages from Tacitus and Petronius, Auerbach concluded, “However vast the difference between the two . . . both reveal the limits of antique realism and thus of antique historical consciousness.”44 Whether or not he is right about antique realism or even about historical information, his essential point that Petronius’ Satyricon actually provides a more concrete view of Rome’s “true” social world further emphasizes the role of the fictional imagination in historical representation. In late antiquity, Macrobius’ Commentary on the Dream of Scipio reveals its author’s awareness of an existing distinction between fact and fiction, myth and history, and truth and falsity, for he begins his work with a discussion of the efficacy of using fiction to analyze government problems or to understand history, astronomy, or geography, thus making the fictional dream the very space in which historical reality can be analyzed and probed.45 This dichotomy also carries over to the Christian writers. Augustine, for example, in the City of God, launches a detailed attack on the false gods of the Romans, as represented in Virgil’s Aeneid, which he reads as history, while he simultaneously asserts the absolute truth of the Christian dispensation. In De Doctrina Christiana, dividing all human activities into what is uti (useful) or frui (enjoyable), he introduces yet another dichotomy into this discussion. Since only God is frui, then all other activities can be useful (De Doct. Christ. 1.22.20). Thus, as with Plato’s dismissal of Greek myths as untrue, Augustine labels pagan beliefs about the gods as superstition. Yet, in Books 2 and 3 of the De Doctrina, he considers how the pagan learning of his youth might be useful, particularly if it helps to interpret the “true” meaning of Scripture. Thus, in Plato and Augustine, we have “truth” applied to a particular epistemology, set of beliefs, or text, and not-true, although potentially useful, to everything that lies outside these parameters. Finally, the western mythographical and history-writing traditions combine the Jewish and Christian tendencies to historicize myth with the Greek tendency to philosophize and rationalize it and the Roman tendency to politicize it. Both the Roman and Hebrew foundation myths lead back to a specific land and

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place, making their histories particular to themselves and to their divinities,46 where they are projected into the “time of beginnings,” what Paul Ricoeur calls “cosmic time.” In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur argues in discussing historical intentionality, I believe correctly, that the historian’s long time-span is “one of the paths by which historical time is led back to cosmic time,” so that “historical time builds its constructions against the background of cosmic time.”47 With such a contention, history and myth-making become linked as epistemological foundations for discovering the processes of history even if the factual details themselves are sidelined. In addition to these mythologizing aspects of historical writing, an examination of the reading patterns and theological understanding of Orosius, Augustine, and Dante reveals that hermeneutical methods themselves assume an almost juridical power in the understanding of history. Shifts in these practices, indeed, direct the understanding of history. As the analysis unfolds, it will become clear that reading practices, particularly as applied to the Bible, can alter Christian views of history and how Christians act in it. The authors’ commitment to certain hermeneutical practices directs how they understand the Bible and as a consequence how they interpret the events and meaning of history. Because of their canonical and authoritative status, both the Roman and biblical foundation narratives prompt continual reinterpretation of the idea of historical or divine destiny from the perspective of a new present.48 The specific temporal contexts of their interpretations often drive the new understanding, thus opening their works to more diverse readings,49 and as a consequence to how ideas of providential history themselves may be subject to how the texts are interpreted. In examining the reception of an idea, in this case, divine providence and its existence as an explanation of the workings of history, we are confronted with the changing intellectual and cultural roles of sacred and profane canons. Indeed, tracing an idea, like divine providence, that is translated (in the sense of translatio, that is, transported, carried across, and transferred) requires an examination of the authority of the studium, sacerdotium, and imperium, where canons and their reception are created, translated, promulgated, and preserved.50 Avoiding the contentious discussions about the “western” literary canon and its collusion with power elites that have permeated educational establishments in the United States in the last 40 years, I begin with a fact of cultural history: that the bibles of the western canon, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, and Virgil’s Aeneid have undergone various appropriations, one might

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even say incarnations, reincarnations, or even purgations. Whether these appropriations have correctly grasped the original texts, have imitated or echoed them,51 deliberately swerved from them,52 misread them, selectively read or edited them, or undermined them,53 together constitute their reception history. In fact, the vast range of responses in the history of their reception challenges the very nature of how one would construe an authentic meaning. Reception has been a particularly vexed subject for the relationship between the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, leading to some of the earliest so-called heresies, as Marcionism, for example, which had restricted Christian literature to the Gospel of Luke and the letters of Paul with all Judaic characteristics edited out. Some modern biblical theologians and Christian scholars, as typified by Northrop Frye, adopted the word “fulfillment” to describe the relationship of New Testament texts to the Hebrew Bible. Reading canonically, that is, through the canon as the “Word of God,” and according to the assumed “spirit,” to make the Hebrew Bible consistent with the Christian Bible, these scholars depend on typological and structural parallels to undergird their arguments that connect the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. For Harold Bloom, on the other hand, Christians, who use the term “fulfillment,” have made the Hebrew Bible the “captive prize of the Gentiles.”54 Nonetheless, for good or ill, this interpretative approach to biblical texts (as typology and allegory) was the dominant mode until the Reformation, which means that to understand how these texts were translated and appropriated requires that we “listen” to how they were received. For some, especially modern historical-critical biblical scholars, these reading and appropriating patterns represent a radical hermeneutical mistake. Patterns of reception are also intimately connected to hermeneutical or interpretative practices, in fact, to the interpretative practices of both the original writers and their readers through a long history of reading practices. Indeed, as Hans-Georg Gadamer argued, the act of interpreting on the part of the reader, invariably involves a “fusion of horizons” in which the later reader or interpreter fuses his or her own horizon with the “original text.”55 Following the trajectory of the various ways in which these earlier works are received presents a history of the fusion of horizons that produces new readings of the very same foundation texts. The later work or author often reinterprets in order to appropriate (in any number of genres or literary responses including allusion, echo, authoritative citation or rewriting) or revise the original. In the case of the authors studied here, we see that as writers/readers, whether in dialogue with their precursor texts, or deliberately misunderstanding them, the allusion, echo, or revision

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always becomes a new interpretation of the older precursor work. It is precisely the canonical status of the first text that spurs the newer version of the original. For example, when Virgil takes his hero Aeneas to the underworld to hear his own and Rome’s future, the scene between Aeneas and his father Anchises replicates the encounter in the heavens between Scipio Africanus the Elder and his adopted grandson in Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” when the general who had conquered Carthage questions imperial aggrandizement, as will be discussed in Chapter 1. Echoing the earlier scene draws out the stark difference between the grand imperial ambitions of Rome in the first century and the neo-platonic aversion to worldly values Cicero’s work contemplates. But, when Virgil, the later writer, has this earlier literary scene shadow his own, his poem reflects anxiety about Roman achievement and conveys his “private voice of mourning.”56 While we might recognize that all later writers are in some sort of conversation or dialogue with their canonical precursors, at the risk of setting up a dangerous binary system for assessing the practice of hermeneutics in this particular reception history, Paul’s interpretation of biblical narrative “in the flesh” and “in the spirit,” as developed in 1 Cor. 10, does provide a useful access to the authors discussed here. Allegorical interpretative strategies that were already common in Israel in the first century and that came to dominate Christian reading practices found their origins in Paul’s distinction between the “spirit” and the “letter,” which for Augustine paralleled “the inner and outer self.”57 Indeed, Augustine knew only too well, as a trained rhetorician and avid reader, that the ambiguity of words opened up the possibility of what he would deem wrong readings, which would translate to taking what was meant figuratively in a “carnal” sense (De Doct. Christ. 3.5.9). In 1 Cor. 10, Paul, doubtless provides a supersessionist reading to take the original text captive, for he summarizes and allegorizes the following events from Exodus: the crossing of the Red Sea (Exod. 14.15–31; 1 Cor.10.1–2), eating manna in the desert (Exod. 16. 9–18; 1 Cor. 10.3), water flowing from the rock at Horeb (Exod. 17.1–7; 1 Cor. 10.4), and the reveling that followed the creation of the golden calf (Exod. 32.6; 1 Cor. 10.7). By making these events symbolic (1. Cor. 11.11), Paul interprets all of them as signs of the supernatural: the sea-crossing as baptism, the manna, and water flowing as supernatural (and symbolic) nourishment, and the death of 23,000 (1 Cor. 11.8) as just punishment for idolatry. “Consider Israel according to the flesh” (1 Cor. 10. 18, my translation because the Oxford version obfuscates the Greek) makes clear that Paul draws a distinction here between the literal “Israel” of history and its social practices kata sarka (according to the

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flesh) and symbolic Israel, which he makes “Christ’s.”58 The Pauline text is also central to Augustine’s theory of allegory, for he makes the sea-crossing Christian baptism and the food and drink, the blood and body of Christ. As Stock argues, “Augustine takes the view that Paul refers to the historical account in Exodus (historia) in order to signify (significare) an allegory of the Christian people to come.”59 Paul has reread, interpreted, or translated the narrative against its own historical claims and according to his own symbolic imagination and spiritual understanding. But this is not to deny its Jewish origins. Rather, Paul sets out to keep Israel, as he understands it, alive, for the time when he experiences it according to the meaning he makes of what he believed was the Messianic event. For the Christian authors studied here, both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles provide texts to be interpreted according to the “spirit” to support their own swerves away from what they understand as a “carnal” understanding of divine providence. This pattern of appropriating scriptural texts follows an ancient pattern in the Hebrew tradition in which earlier scriptural texts were woven into later ones, with the quoting of earlier texts becoming commonplace in the sacred texts of the first century.60 Paul’s letters that are collected into the New Testament typify what Michael Fishbane, calls “inner biblical exegesis,” which, as will be discussed in Chapter 1, is a common trait of the Hebrew texts,61 which we will see with the texts of promise that function to link many disparate narratives together as they create a continuous history of land-claiming and loss. When the New Testament echoes scriptural references from the Hebrew Bible, it follows this pattern of “inner biblical exegesis” to forge a new interpretation of the earlier texts according to the changed historical and social circumstances of the first century when the events of the New Testament occurred. Furthermore, in this climate of radical historical and political change, allegorical reading and writing strategies (for both Jews and followers of the Christian dispensation in various configurations) have emerged as critical means for “recuperating” earlier texts. Augustine’s conviction, as developed in the De Doctrina Christiana, that the Bible (Hebrew and New Testament combined) must teach love of God and love of neighbor (De Doct. Christ. 1. 36.40) invites readers to construct patterns of relationships between the Hebrew and Christian texts through allegories or typologies. That is, reading “according to the spirit,” symbolically and metaphorically becomes a primary means to retain the Hebrew Bible, what Bloom calls “making it captive” for the Christians. Yet, when Augustine writes the City of God, he rejects allegory as a trope whereby to read Virgil’s Aeneid and instead reads the poem as history, that is, “according to the flesh,” to argue

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against its poet who he makes a proponent of the civic destiny of the Romans which Augustine rejects, while freeing himself of his erstwhile affection for Virgil’s eloquence. About Augustine’s simultaneous attraction and aversion to Virgil in the Confessions, Brian Stock writes: “it [The Aeneid] gives him pleasure; at the same time, he wishes to isolate himself from it because he understands that the pleasure is illusory.”62 By the time Augustine was writing the City of God, he had a hermeneutical strategy to confine Virgil’s major poem to its historical claims. At the same time, however, he reads the Psalms according to the spirit and ignores their historical implications. Biblical texts that contradict his spiritual understanding of history, for example, the idea of the promised land, he allegorizes to evacuate and exile the historical claims of the original. Orosius, on the other hand, adopts the Virgilian legacy, reading the Aeneid, like Augustine does, as history. Reading biblical history according to the letter, he fuses Daniel with the Virgilian narrative and adopts Roman destiny as the heritage of a Christian empire to present a universal history, “according to the flesh.” Orosius flattens his primary sources, Livy, Virgil, and the Bible to their literal and historical levels. The fact remains that no matter how much traditional typological and allegorical reading strategies undermine the Hebrew Scriptures, they are central to Paul’s rhetorical strategy for developing his theological arguments and they continue to inform theology and poetry from late antiquity at least to Dante,63 who is an exemplary case of appropriation as literary practice. With roots in the ancient worlds of both Judea and classical Greece and Rome, allegory as a reading and writing strategy dominated the Middle Ages in all spheres of writing, giving rise to what has been referred to as “an abundance of forms,”64 for it opens up texts to multiple dimensions beyond the literal and historical (or political and social). In fact, it could be sustained that Dante’s use of precursor literary works, which he reframes through his figural imagination, is one of the most pointed ways in which he establishes his own authority as a writer. Dante’s translations of his authorized canon, Virgil and Ovid, Lucan and Horace, Augustine and the Bible, for example, show multiple strategies of borrowing, supplementing, recasting, and rereading. Indeed, whether the Commedia is an extended gloss on Inferno 1.85, when Dante the Pilgrim says to Virgil, “Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ‘l mio autore” (You are my master and my author),65 or he uses the Bible “less as a source of proof texts than as a divine ‘pretext’ for the story,”66 or Virgil’s epic is simultaneously assimilated and purged,67 Dante applies multiple strategies for responding to his precursor texts. Virgil’s epic is reincarnated in Christian form as Dante the Pilgrim becomes a new Aeneas and Dante’s poem

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becomes a Christian epic, while Virgil’s paganism and dark view of history is confined to the static world of Limbo where conversion can be acknowledged but not experienced. Imitating the typological conversion pattern of Paul and Augustine, Dante features neither as major figures in the poem, even while he regularly cites their words and follows their prompts to support his own incarnational and confessional poetry of conversion.68 In other words, Dante is totally unlike Orosius, who follows a literal and historical exegetical program. In both the Monarchia and the Commedia, like Augustine before him, for his own poetic and theological purposes, and reading “according to the spirit,” Dante translates a catena of canonical texts as the means whereby he hopes to understand contemporary events, history, eschatological hope and expectation, and his own place in a providentially guided universe in which human fortune and behavior is inevitably contingent. To understand the origins of the idea of providential history in western literary and historical tradition, in the first chapter, we will briefly examine what Cicero, Virgil, Livy, the Bible, and Josephus bequeath to Orosius, Augustine, and Dante. This chapter thus seeks to provide a background to the central ideas to be discussed by examining how Virgil’s Aeneid and Livy set out the theory of historical destiny for the Romans and how it parallels or contrasts with the idea of the promised land found in the Hebrew Bible. Livy, Virgil, and the Bible lay the literary-mythological-theological foundation stones for a providential theory of history with which Orosius, the subject of Chapter 2, Augustine, the focus of Chapter 3, and Dante will debate. Chapter 4 addresses Dante’s adoption of a providential theory of history in the Monarchia, which is based on the historic coincidence of the birth of Christ and the Augustan reign of peace. Chapter 5 examines all cantos 6 and 7 throughout the poem to argue that the movement upward into cosmic time and away from human time leads Dante to a theology of history based on the meaning of the Incarnation as an act of divine love. In Christian historiography, the Incarnation opened the pathway to eternal life, thus presenting humans with choices about how they should act and behave in history and questioning whether any political realm could be linked to the divine realm. All three later writers accept Virgil and Livy as authorities and as historians of Roman history and achievement and the Bible as a sacred text. Virgil and Livy handed the Christian thinkers of the late Empire, Orosius and Augustine, (for whom Cicero and Sallust provided alternative authorities to measure Roman achievement), the foundation for developing their own historical and theological views from which Dante formed his own position in the fourteenth century.

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History, or the facts of the time, combines with the particular philosophical, political, religious views, or interpretive practices of these authors to reflect contradictory views of historical destiny and of the providential history of Rome. Orosius claims to be writing history, and indeed, inventing western or Latin universal history he begins with a king of the Assyrians, Ninus, and follows a chronological order up to the Romans after the invasions of the early fifth century. He writes his history as a seamless narrative in which one empire gives way to the next until the “epochal” triumph of the Christian Roman Empire. In contrast, Augustine writes in the preface to the City of God that he is writing a defense of the city of God against the pagan divinities of the Roman Empire, thus creating a rift between the pagan and Christian worlds. An exemplary product of the best humanist Roman education, which he engages in his own polemic against the Romans, nonetheless, Augustine reads history as a “separatist” in the sense that he identifies the “terrena civitate” (the earthly city) with an endless search for mastery over others, which would be directly in conflict with the city of God. Finally, Dante in the Monarchia, professes to be writing a work that treats of “temporalis Monarchie” (temporal monarchy [Monarchia 1. 1. 5]), which appears to be a work of political philosophy and also a theology of history69 that seeks to recover the ideal of the Christian Roman Empire, without the contamination introduced when Constantine allegedly gave temporal power to the Roman bishop. In the Commedia, Dante confronts the historical legacy of the Roman Empire and the political failures of his own time, engaging the entire range of disciplines and literary genres known to him70 in order to evaluate the meaning of human destiny from the vantage point of eternity. This is a study that asks the fundamental question: what is the use of the past and how does it inform the present? Dante and his ancient sources all interpret the present in relationship to their specific understanding or uses of the past. This drives some to adopt a teleological theory of human history that is usually called providential or destined history; others reject this idea; finally, depending on the literary context of his deliberation, Dante straddles this divide. Because Rome and its providential history is the primary topic, these works must confront the ideology of Rome as city, as Empire, and as symbolic center of Christian religious practice as represented in a literary tradition. This book examines both the discursive making of authoritative positions on providential history and the constraints that particular hermeneutical principles and religious convictions play in how the facts of history are to be understood.

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Destined Lands and Chosen Fathers: Virgil, Livy, and the Bible

Orosius, Augustine, and Dante inherit ideas about providence from both Roman and biblical sources in which proclamations about destined or providential history, land claiming, and divine election define the Latin, Jewish, and Christian literary traditions. The Hebrew Bible and the Roman poets of the Augustan Age identify specific lands as destined for their respective people. Divinities promise lands, patronize leaders or chosen persons, and work hard at helping their clients to take possession of lands. Yet the narratives of the legendary promises of destined lands invariably express reservations about what is lost in the process of occupying this destined land, or they draw attention to the process of dispossession that accompanies taking possession. In other words, they relate how war and displacement precede occupying the destined lands. Thus, while recounting the triumphant destiny and providential achievement of founding fathers, which appear to signal the end of “exile” and displacement and the arrival of a glorious new age, these narratives often simultaneously introduce a search for perspective that probes the limits of the historical and political achievement and features what has been lost as a consequence. “Epochality,” a current term that can be appropriately applied to these earlier ideas of historical achievement, characterizes a belief that history has reached a terminus or a turning point and fulfillment of destiny. This theory, which appears in Livy, Virgil, and Orosius (and the earlier architects/apologists for the Christian Roman Empire, Lactantius, and Eusebius), has had some currency in the last 20 years since the fall of the Soviet Union. Taken from Hegel and Marx, the expression, “end of history” has been adopted by Francis Fukuyama1 to characterize his argument that “history was reaching its terminus.”2 This triumphalist historicism contributes to what Fredric Jameson refers to as “a sense that a whole new unparalleled era was beginning.”3 Jameson identifies “the end of history,” as elaborated by Francis Fukuyama and Alexandre Kojève, with

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a particularly apt term, “epochality . . . by way of which we defend the historical meaning and significance of the present moment and the present age against all claims of the past and future.”4 This concept accurately characterizes the attitude of the Roman writers who believed that the ascent of Augustus Caesar began an unprecedented and new epoch, a golden age. Livy, the prose historian of the city of Rome, and Virgil, whose major poem follows the epic tradition of Homer, present the founding of Rome as a triumphal story in which Rome rises from the ashes of Troy. They both emphasize the city’s destiny as empire, upholder of laws, and ruler by military might. Orosius, too, maintains that the Roman Empire has surpassed others in its benefits to society. Like his Christian apologist precursors, Eusebius and Lactantius, Orosius presents his history as the success of virtue and the simultaneous end of history or of the need or possibility of any other world system. The term “epochality,” however, might also be applied to certain events that force shifts in confidence, political alignments, religious convictions, or that result in profound questioning of a social or political entity’s self-understanding. Three traumatic events of this variety stand out in the respective histories of Judaism and Christianity. For example, the destruction of Jerusalem and the first temple in 586 BCE and the Babylonian exile that followed these catastrophes constitute an epochal change, just as the destruction of the second temple by Titus in 70 CE features Roman triumph alongside Jewish political and cultural abjection. When the Goths attacked Rome in the first decade of the fifth century, the illusion that Rome was eternal was ineluctably shattered while Christians shuddered as they were blamed for Rome’s vulnerability. These alternative types of epochal events contrast with the triumphalist results following Rome’s pacification of her opponents at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE or Constantine’s crushing of his enemies at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 CE. The first event led to the founding of the empire under Augustus Caesar and the second brought Christian persecution to an end and resulted in the establishment of the Christian Roman Empire. However, despite the “epochal” claims in some of these texts, we will also find in the Roman writers and the biblical canon a search for perspective, which emerges from new historical circumstances and changes in both self or communal understanding and civic outlooks. Notable distinctions separate the Roman traditions about historical destiny from the Hebrew land claims as received in the ancient world, and these must be taken into account even if

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Orosius, Augustine, and Dante adopt the legacies as related histories. Although the Latin works and the Hebrew Bible make claims about destined lands, critical differences separate Virgil’s Aeneid and Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City) as “completed” works5 and the Hebrew Bible (or Septuagint) as collected into a canon of sacred texts. First, the Aeneid and Ab Urbe Condita are the works of single authors produced during the mature periods of their lives. In contrast, the Hebrew Bible is a composite work, bringing together multiple strands and diverse textual traditions, created by many authors and redactors over a millennium. Marked shifts in interpreting the narrative/s of the Hebrew people occur over such a long timespan and such shifts are reflected in the work of redactors, individual authors,6 and by “inner biblical exegesis.”7 Nonetheless, both traditions represent historical perspectives that convey multiple views about what the various events narrated actually mean to the history of the respective people. The Latin works follow the success of Augustus Caesar over civil war, political chaos, and external threats to Rome, as the exiles from Troy have finally gained their destined lands as witnessed in Octavius’ victory. In contrast, one of the most salient aspects of the Hebrew Bible is that despite all the promises to chosen people about destined lands and the tragic history of dispossession, the canon of texts that came together in some sort of final form in Hebrew in the first century of the Common Era and in Greek in 285–246 BCE was not composed from the historic vantage point of victory over adversity or adversaries. Rather, the canon, particularly that of post-Temple Judaism as well as the Septuagint, belongs to the times of exile and/or diaspora, thus in a sense coming into its arranged form as a postexilic search for understanding that itself is the catena of texts with all its surprising promises, contradictions, failures, and disappointments. Approaching the idea of providence or destiny as conveyed in the Hebrew Bible requires that we consider the determinative role of interpretive practices. Ways of reading, already installed in the Hebrew Bible as early as the prophets, include literal, historical, allegorical, and typological approaches.8 Through typology, past events become the means to interpret later ones, or future events are understood in terms of earlier ones. This practice connects to inner biblical exegesis, whereby later biblical authors align their work with earlier texts by citation, echo, or allusion, a common occurrence in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. This narrative trait of the biblical text, it has been argued, constitutes a literary response to crisis threatening any sense of communal continuity.9 Thus, turning to an established literary tradition or to the authoritative texts,

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quotations, or allusions to them, becomes an educational, nostalgic, or palliative response to exile, dislocation, or a feeling of political and cultural rupture from the past. For example, Psalm 104 (105) summarizes the patriarchal and exilic histories of Genesis and Exodus, the narrative prayer becoming a brief version of the primal origins that both remembers and confirms the divine covenants. This narrative technique (and in this case historical and scriptural intertexts) can appear as a synopsis of a longer history or as a substitute for the particularities of place (land), with either compensating for potential displacement, loss, or rupture from the past. It might also be argued that this turn to precursor texts is a primary means to create literary and cultural continuity in the texts redacted as the canonical and authoritative Bible. In other words, the Bible as a sociological and cultural text replaces what might have been provided by location, whether temple or historic lands. These reading/interpretive practices become especially relevant in a discussion of covenant or promise narratives that also emerge as the theme that ties the texts together as a whole, particularly in light of changing historical circumstances for the ancient Israelites. Thus, the texts that promise a homeland realized in the Davidic dynasty and symbolized in the temple built by Solomon in Jerusalem become the site for diverse reinterpretations.10 In other words, examining these authoritative narratives with textual, sourcecritical, rhetorical, and ideological tools reveals the particular circumstances or context of their production, the history of their interpretation, the impact of the ideas they expound on later developments as well as their unique understanding of the divine interest in history. The perspective of the time when the texts were composed or redacted rather than the temporal context, that is, the time the texts treat, provides the horizon whereby the author/s propose to understand the meaning of the history narrated. For the Bible, this involves the time and circumstances when the text/s of origin were redacted, which is itself a type of interpretation. It also involves the time and place for creating the order of the texts collected as the Hebrew or biblical canon, which in turn reveals the temporal horizon for situating interpretive perspectives on the meaning of historical destiny. A third aspect that needs to be included is the status of the canon of authorized texts, that is, those included in a sacred authoritative collection and how attention to specific texts differs over time, thus creating canons within the canon.11 A fourth feature is how developments in later historical times affect the interpretation of biblical texts. This study generally examines the Bible in its canonical form, reading it as a seamless narrative, thus bracketing what we know about sources, dating,

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fragments, and other textual history matters.12 However, when pertinent to the argument, it examines how various texts of the Bible are used and applied authoritatively outside the context of their composition (as redacted texts) or of their arrangement in the Bible. Orosius, Augustine, and Dante, for example, use the Bible as an authoritative text but select specific books or pericopes that are more important to them as proof texts. In addition, it will become evident that more literal readings of Scripture, like those found in the Christian apologists for the Roman Empire, Lactantius, Eusebius, and Orosius, support a history whose focus is political, particularly in reference to the status of the Roman Empire. These writers also often apply allegorical readings to produce specific historical or political understandings. In contrast, the kinds of allegorical reading that Augustine proposes in the De Doctrina Christiana, particularly Books 2 and 3, oppose a rigid focus on specific temporal histories: the literal lands of Israel, Babylon, Rome, or Egypt, although they are places with particular histories, they become symbolic places. However, more literal readings of Scripture may be used to uphold a narrowly conceived providential interpretation of temporal history. Since the Bible, particularly the Hebrew Scriptures, features a god of battles,13 intervening both for and against his people, finding scriptural passages to support political and military action to claim land and divine aid is not difficult for “literal” readers. In turn, these literally read events of Israelite history are often allegorized to render a political interpretation that can be inserted into a new historical narrative as happened in Eusebius’ version of Constantine’s conversion and victories, which required a rereading of biblical and Roman history to establish the interrelationship of Roman destiny and political aspirations under the auspices of Christianity.

Hebrew Bible Although one might safely say that the search for perspective about a lachrymose history dominates the canon of Hebrew Scriptures, nonetheless, we see at least two other strands interwoven with this narrative: epochal history, as discussed above, that leads to triumph over enemies and the achievement of promised or destined lands and educational history, or exile as punishment from God for wrongdoing. In educational history, the past is a preparation or a lesson for the present. The past thus emerges as the means by which the present can be

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evaluated or judged, or it becomes a source of moral or political lessons. This education explains why God’s promise might be rescinded. Furthermore, as preparation for the present, the past accrues ideological or moral significance for the present; in fact, its telling provides an understanding of the present; moreover, present events may be interpreted as the result of the moral failures or successes of the past; virtue is the measure of human achievement or failure. We find this approach in historians like Livy and Orosius, who believe optimistically that the past can provide examples of situations to avoid or follow in the future. Many biblical writers also adopt this means to explain, for example, why the Israelites seem doomed to repetitive cycles of history that inevitably locate them in exile. Reading the biblical text as the saga of the history of the Hebrew people reveals that their divinity repeatedly promises land to His chosen clients, and along with other promises, which occur throughout the Hebrew Bible, the promise of land features more prominently in certain books than others.14 They pervade the patriarchal histories, as the patriarchs receive the promises directly from the divinity, and the divinity does not express preconditions for the boon or expect anything in return, at least in Genesis.15 Most prominent in Gen. 12–50, the promise of land also occurs frequently in Deuteronomy.16 Early in the narrative of the patriarchs, in Gen. 12.1–3, God promises that He will make Abram a great nation in a new land: “The Lord [Yahweh] said to Abram, ‘Leave your own country, your kin, and your father’s house, and go to a country that I will show you. I shall make you a great nation; I shall bless you and make your name so great that it will be used in blessings.’ ’’ This constitutes the threefold divine promise to Abraham that is the core of the Yahwist author’s affirmation of divine purpose.17 In Deut. 1.8, the redactor records the words of Moses from God on the historical significance of this promise of land: “I have laid the land open before you; go in and occupy it, the land which the Lord swore to give to your forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to their descendents after them.” The historic promise to the patriarchs in Genesis emerges as the justification for the possession of the land in the period following the narrative of the Egyptian exile. But, the texts also show that others had occupied the land. For example, after the Lord’s admonition in Gen. 12.1–3, Abram leaves Harran and goes to Canaan, but the narrative makes clear that although the Lord has given the land, the Canaanites already inhabited it: “When they [Abram, Lot, and their wives and dependents] arrived there, Abram went on as far as the sanctuary

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at Shechem, the terebinth tree of Moreh. (At that time the Canaanites lived in the land.) When the Lord appeared to him, and said, ‘I am giving this land to your descendents,’ Abram built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him” (Gen. 12:5–7). God’s promise to Abram in Gen. 12 is repeated at Gen. 15, only this time Abraham is also assured of a dynasty, for his descendents will inherit the land, “I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldees to give you this land as your possession” (Gen. 15.7), and once more God makes a covenant with Abram, “That day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, and said, ‘I give to your descendants this land from the river of Egypt to the Great River, the river Euphrates, the territory of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites’ ’’ (Gen.15.18–20). Again, essential to note is that while the biblical text has the Lord declare the promise, just as we will see with the promises to Aeneas about land in Italy, he lists a catalog of other people who occupy the promised/destined land. Thus, the narrative promises reveal that possession will require dispossession, that is, war. Interpretations of these promise narratives vary depending on the specific historical perspective that situates them at different times in Israelite history. First, it is argued that they belong to a historical period when possession of the land was in jeopardy, in other words that these texts are the creations of the Babylonian exile (586 BCE); second, some argue that the promise is so ancient that it goes back to pre-Israelite and pre-Canaanite times; third, Abraham was already in Canaan when the idea of the promise surfaced, which would mean that the God promising was not a nomadic God but a resident God, who is asking Abraham to displace the cult already in place at Shechem in Canaan and replace it with a Yahwist cult. Thus, since this land was around Hebron, the promise appears to legitimize the patriarchal settlement in Canaan.18 But, as Davies argued in The Gospel and the Land, what is important is not the historical origin of the promise. Of far greater significance is what the promise comes to mean once collected or redacted into the biblical canon. Besides being a narrative device to frame the collection itself, the promise acquired ideological power, as it became a “formative, dynamic, seminal force in the history of Israel”19 and in its self-understanding because the promise is a recurring theme throughout the patriarchal narratives. It functions as one of the critical narrative devices that link the discontinuous histories. After all, despite all these promises that are chronologically arranged in a historically framed narrative, it is not until Samuel (1 Sam. 13.19), in other words, in the context of the Davidic dynasty (1010–970 BCE),

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when the land is finally secured, that the concept of the land of “Israel” appears in the biblical text.20 In other words, only when the nation of Israel comes into existence are the narrative promises achieved in history.21 This coincides with the first major period of redaction of Israel’s national-religious writings, that is, of what would become the sacred-religious writings, and eventually the Hebrew Bible (400 BCE–90 CE),22 thus linking historical narrative, sacred text, and political developments. In other words, the reception of this promise and the notion of divine election woven into the sacred canon of texts in turn become an enduring strand in the ideology of divine providence that later Christian writers, specifically the ones discussed in this study, inherit. These divine land promises and the providential election of the Israelites provide a concrete example of how the temporal horizon of the text, that is, the point at which one intervenes to interpret it, modifies, even forms a new meaning, especially with the catena of texts gathered into the canonical Hebrew Bible. Focusing on sources, chronology, and textual history allows us to situate the promises at certain points in Israelite history and understand why and to what purposes these promise narratives were introduced. The Abraham covenant as a biblical text in itself (both in its canonical form and in terms of source and text history) reveals the centrality of this narrative promise to the self-understanding of the ancient Israelites in the period when the Pentateuch was being redacted during the Davidic dynasty. On the other hand, once the promise of land and divine election are incorporated into a canon that arranges the various texts in chronological order (not in order of their composition but arranged according to their place in a historical narrative, beginning in Eden, followed by the patriarchal foundation legend, the exodus, and the return), they can and do become organizing principles for the self-understanding of a people. Also, because the redaction and hermeneutical practices dominating the promise narratives in the Hebrew Bible shift over time, they take on new meanings in later times, the promises becoming an eschatological hope for the future, as in the prophets.23 Once assumed into a revised Christian sacred canon including the New Testament, several centuries later in the fourth-century CE, the narrative arrangement coupled with the newly adopted hermeneutical principles constituted a paradigm shift that required a rereading of the historic promises, the idea of divine election, and providence. Only during the Davidic dynasty does Israel realize the “promise to become a great nation,” thus linking the “original” promise with the Davidic kingdom and the kingdom of Judah, which lasted from 1007 BCE to 586 BCE. When Yahweh

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promises David, “You are the shepherd of my people Israel; you are to be their prince” (2 Sam. 5.2), in a literal reading of the textual traditions, the Yahwist redactor/s appropriate/s the Abrahamic covenant to David. Here the redactor/s demonstrate/s the role played by the Abrahamic covenant in interpreting the history unfolding in the Davidic period.24 The Abraham promises, whether or not they preexisted this period or not, as part of the patriarchal narrative, had assumed this canonical (and authoritative) force to justify a divinely orchestrated destiny of a people and their possession of the land. We can see that during the Davidic dynasty, a period of heightened attention to centralizing power and redacting “religious” texts, which worked in tandem as political activities, the narratives of the patriarchs provided both divine and textual authority for the possession of the land and construction of the nation of ancient Israel. However, when we think about the history of reading these texts, it is imperative to recall that the works that comprise the canon, although a composite of texts with multiple layers written and edited by many authors with diverse rhetorical and theological intentions at different times, by the first century had acquired legitimated authority, and were read, heard, commented on, or recited without the historical and source critical knowledge that characterizes contemporary learned reading. Functioning in this authoritative way, the texts thus maintained the divine promise as a living hope and expectation, as if they were the word of God. While Genesis and Kings invariably turn to tell dynastic histories that conform to the divine promise, counter-narratives also reveal divine vengeance and willingness to confiscate the destined land following Israelite betrayal of their God. For example, in a Hebrew Bible version of “educational history,” the refrain of the Deuteronomic histories decrying Israel’s apostasy echoes throughout as once again the Israelites “did what was wrong in the eyes of the Lord, following in the footsteps of his father and mother and in those of Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had led Israel into sin” (1 Kgs. 22.52; cf. 1 Kgs. 15.34, 1 Kgs. 16.30). In Isaiah, the prophet announces, “The Lord, the Lord of Hosts, is about to strip Jerusalem and Judah of every prop and stay” (Isa. 3.1), and attributing this to their apostasy, the prophet cries, “Therefore my people shall go into captivity because they lack all knowledge of me” (Isa. 5.13). If the Hebrew Bible offers a history of a people attempting to render an account to themselves of the meaning of their history, the Isaiah position is hardly unique. A counter-narrative seems to follow every seeming political achievement, as Amos writes, “Behold, I the Lord God, have my eyes on this sinful kingdom, and I shall destroy it from the face of the earth” (Amos. 9.8). Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that the prophets resisted

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hopes of return. Just the contrary, as Davies writes, even in Isaiah, “There is a core of particularism in the most universal of the prophets.”25 But in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, as well as in Isaiah, the land figures as a place of return to a renewed kingdom of David, one that has restored righteousness and justice (Isa. 9.7).26 Jeremiah, like Ezekiel, had certainly made the argument that the God of the Israelites did not reside in Jerusalem and could be encountered even, or perhaps especially, in exile, but this did not translate into a denial of the necessity of return. Like Deutero-Isaiah (Isa. 49.5 f.), who recognizes Israel’s punishment for its apostasy, Ezekiel still maintains that Israel (as the people) is to open itself to gentiles and also gather its people together, as beautifully expressed in the poetic voice of God: I, too shall take a slip From the lofty crown of the cedar And set it in the soil; I shall pluck a tender shoot from the topmost branch And plant it on a high and lofty mountain, The highest mountain in Israel. It will put out branches, bear its fruit, And become a noble cedar. Birds of every kind will roost under it, Perching in the shelter of its boughs. All the trees of the countryside will know That it is I, the Lord, Who bring low the tall tree And raise the lowly tree high, Who shrivel up the green tree And make the shrivelled tree put forth buds. I, the Lord, have spoken. I shall do it. Ezek. 17.22–4

Notwithstanding the canonical story’s promise of land and prosperity, the narrative nonetheless remembers the famine that forced Abram to seek food, and to choose exile to Egypt: “The land was stricken by a famine so severe that Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a time” (Gen. 12.10–11). The eventual exile of Jacob’s family to Egypt, again due to famine (or the unpromising land), “Thus the sons of Israel went with everyone else to buy grain because of the famine in Canaan” (Gen. 42.5), led to centuries of enslavement, according to the biblical legend. But the inscribed divine covenant to provide land and

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descendents returns to the text in Deuteronomy when the Lord promises to restore the Israelites’ fortunes: “In compassion for you he will gather you again from all the peoples to which he has dispersed you. Even though he has banished you to the ends of the earth, the Lord your God will gather you from there, and from there he will fetch you home. The Lord your God will bring you into the land which your forefathers occupied, and you will occupy it again; then he will bring you prosperity and make you more numerous than your forefathers were” (Deut. 30.3–5). The return to Canaan is hardly propitious or easy, despite divine election. Again, the exiled Israelites do not find an empty land. The Book of Joshua recounts the ongoing warfare required to take possession of it. Despite setbacks, the narrative of the conquest declares that the Lord stood steadfast with Joshua, and indeed took a role in the repossession of the land. For example, “The Lord said to Joshua, ‘Do not be afraid or discouraged; take the whole army with you and go and attack Ai. I am delivering the king of Ai into your hands, along with his people, his city, and his territory. Deal with Ai and its king as you dealt with Jericho and its king, except that you may keep for yourselves the cattle and any other spoil you take. Set an ambush for the city to the west of it” (Josh. 8.1–2). Josh. 23, in fact, declares that Yahweh gained possession of the land through conquest, and He alone then gave the land to Israel (23.3). Once more, with the mouth of Joshua as the medium, the redactor has God speak to the Israelites, summarizing the patriarchal histories of Genesis and the Exodus narrative to emphasize the land promise and God’s role in taking possession of the land: “[T]his is the word of the Lord the God of Israel: Long ago your forefathers, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. I took your ancestor Abraham from beside the Euphrates and led them through the length and breadth of Canaan. I gave him many descendents: I gave him Isaac, and to Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau. I assigned the hill-country of Seir to Esau as his possession; Jacob and his sons went down to Egypt. Later I sent Moses and Aaron, and I struck the Egyptians with plagues— you know well what I did among them—and after that I brought you out; I brought your forefathers out of Egypt, but at the Red Sea the Egyptians sent their chariots and cavalry to pursue them . . . . you saw for yourselves what I did to Egypt. For a long time you lived in the wilderness, and then I brought you into the land of the Amorites who lived east of Jordan. They fought against you, but I delivered them into your power; you took possession of their country, when I destroyed them before you . . . I gave you land on which you had not labored,

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towns which you had not built; you have settled in those towns and you eat the produce of vineyards and olive groves which you did not plant” (Josh. 24.2–13). Here the redactor assembles the land promises of Genesis, Exodus, and the Deuteronomic histories to appropriate the authority of Yahweh to recount God’s action on behalf of the Israelites and to announce that although others occupied the land, God wrested it from them and gave it to the Israelites despite the fact that they had neither tilled it nor built its towns. The Hebrew Scriptures also record a history of dispossession that accompanies the hopes for possession, making the struggle for the land an ongoing battle, despite the ostensible promises from the divinity. For example, in Deut. 9, the Lord speaks to the Israelites telling them, “this day you will be crossing the Jordan to go in and occupy the territory of nations greater and more powerful than you, and great cities with fortifications towering to the sky. . . . Know then this day that it is the Lord your God himself who crosses at your head as a devouring fire; it is he who will subdue them and destroy them as you advance; you will drive them out and soon overwhelm them, as he promised you” (Deut. 9.1–3). The divinity (i.e., in the language of the redactors who framed the narrative), giving an example of “educational” or warning history, justifies the dispossession on the grounds that those being conquered and displaced are wicked, and the Lord is fulfilling the long-standing promise of land: “When the Lord your God drives them out before you, do not say to yourselves, ‘It is because of our merits that the Lord has brought us in to occupy this land.’ It is not because of your merit or your integrity that you are entering their land to occupy it; it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord your God is driving them out before you, and to fulfill the promise which the Lord made on oath to your forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Deut. 9.4–5). However, this land comes at a price, for the divinity asks that those already in possession of the land be displaced: “When the Lord your God gives you peace from your enemies on every side, in the land which he is giving you to occupy as your holding, you must without fail blot out all memory of Amalek from under heaven” (Deut. 25.19). Numbers spells out the consequences of not crushing those who occupy the land, “But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land as you advance, any whom you leave in possession will become like a barbed hook in your eye and a thorn in your side. They will continually dispute your possession of the land” (Num. 33.55). Again in Judges, the dispossession narrative is framed as a divine project: “The Lord God of Israel drove out the Amorites for the benefit of his people Israel. And do you now propose to take

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their place? It is for you to possess whatever Kemosh your god gives you; and all that the Lord our God gave us as we advanced is ours” (Judg. 11.23–4). This theme of taking possession of the land (and losing it) does not cease here. Nehemiah, adopting the “educational history” approach, blames Israelite sinfulness for the suffering of enslavement, conquest, and loss of land: “Today we are slaves,/slaves here in the land/which you gave to our forefathers/so that they might eat its fruits/and enjoy its good things./All its produce now goes to the kings/whom you have set over us/because of our sins./They have power over our bodies/and they do as they please with our livestock;/we are in dire distress” (Neh. 9.36–7). Psalm 134 (135), on the other hand, in a triumphant accolade to the Lord’s deeds, adopts an “epochal” approach to the historic achievement, as it praises the Lord for striking down the firstborn of Egypt, mighty nations and powerful kings, so that their land would become “as a heritage to his people Israel” (Psalm 134 [135]. 8–12). The making of the canon of the Hebrew Bible bound together two aspects of the promise of land to the ancient Israelites, for the promise to Abraham (the product of the Yahwist and the Elohist traditions) was joined to the Deuteronomic and Priestly or cultic notions that Yahweh actually owned the land,27 which meant that Yahweh could also confiscate it as a punishment for apostasy or other wrongdoing. For our purposes, the strands of historical explanation that emerge here include epochal and educational history, the former being the Israelite achievement of the divine promise in the triumph over enemies and the latter, explaining the exile as punishment for betrayal of Yahweh, either due to immorality or apostasy. Finally, accompanied by their message that divine authority underwrote them, these texts of promise, coupled with notions of historical lessons and epochality, took their juridical role into future history. The Hebrew Bible as canon thus provided a model history of divine providence on behalf of the people of God.

The Roman tradition Whereas the Hebrew Bible collects a canon of texts that expresses a search for understanding of a mournful history of exile and loss, Virgil and Livy write at a moment of “epochal” events. This historic achievement provides the foundation for Roman preeminence that Orosius, Augustine, and Dante must confront both as a historical-cultural legacy and as ideology. When Augustus Caesar became

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the emperor, the doors of Janus, closed finally for the third time, bear witness to the “epochality” of the historic moment, for he overcame past defeats, civil war, and Rome’s enemies to install a reign of peace. Thus, in spite of multiple viewpoints, to be discussed below, the Aeneid and Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, in particular, still applaud Roman political and military conquest. In this respect, Virgil and Livy signal a shift from the pre-Augustan writer Cicero. In Cicero’s “The Dream of Scipio” in De Re Publica,28 written prior to Augustus Caesar’s achievement, the author had questioned the goals of imperial expansionism. Cicero imagines Scipio Africanus, the Younger (b.185/184 BCE), encountering his adopted grandfather, Scipio Africanus, the Elder (235–183 BCE.) in a dream. Augustine, as we know from the Confessions, was not only especially attracted to Cicero as a philosopher who had come close to the beliefs of Christianity29 but also because Cicero had questioned the rationale for warfare, and Augustine clearly will follow Cicero’s doubts about imperial goals. Cicero’s work, especially the De Officiis (On Duties) was widely read in the Middle Ages, and Macrobius’ late fourth-century commentary on the “Dream of Scipio” had preserved part of the De Re Publica. Both gave the Middle Ages the concept of a civitas that could provide peace, justice, and security for citizens.30 It is highly probable that Dante knew both, especially since parts of the De Officiis were read alongside the Bible as guides to civic and private duty.31 The encounter with Cacciaguida in Paradiso 15–17 appears to echo similar themes to those raised in Macrobius’ Commentary. Macrobius’ commentary assured that Cicero’s text would have enduring importance, and in fact, it is one of the most authoritative encyclopedic texts from late antiquity for the Latin Middle Ages. Its neo-platonic ethos made it especially popular from the twelfth century on,32 although it was used even up to the Renaissance,33 the number of surviving manuscripts alone pointing to its wide circulation.34 The dream presents Scipio the Elder, who had made war in Carthage and defeated Antiochus of Syria, showing the world beneath—forced to obedience to the Roman people by his own military triumphs—to his adopted grandson Scipio. But when Scipio the Younger looks around at the heavens which “mirabilia videbantur” (appeared splendid and wonderful),35 the Earth in contrast seems insignificant and the portion of the Earth allotted to the Romans likewise small.36 Thus, from the heavens, through the eyes of a general whose life was spent conquering and suppressing this land, the imperium seems insignificant. In keeping with Cicero’s disdain for worldly values as ends in themselves, he is even

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more provocative when he represents Scipio Africanus the Elder recommending that Scipio not direct his gaze to the domain of mankind: Again I see you gazing at the region and abode of mortals. If it seems as small to you as it really is, why not fix your attention upon the heavens and contemn what is mortal? Can you expect any fame from these men, or glory that is worth seeking?37

The view from outside and beyond the world, that is, from the immense and glorious heavens reveals the narrow limits of the Earth and its worldly values. The dream functions to interrogate the goals and assumptions of the Roman expansion and to question the yearning for fame and glory that drives it. From the viewpoint of eternity (or cosmic time), but at the specific historic time of Cicero, the dream, itself an alternative space and time, undermines the project of the emerging Roman imperium expressed in geographic terms, “the great name of Rome herself has not been able to pass the Ganges or to cross the Caucasus.”38 Also, Cicero exposes human desires, and particularly the pursuit of fame, as transitory and vain. These same ideas that interrogate the quest for fame, military achievement, and Roman ambition will reappear in Augustine’s City of God. Cicero’s questioning of imperial goals, however, contrasts with the sentiments that came to dominate Roman writers from the 30s BCE when much of Roman poetry begins to claim universal dominion as Rome’s destiny. Although Roman poets in the Augustan Age also convey reservations about Roman expansion and moral decline after the demise of the Roman Republic, they still support the imperial project. Virgil’s epic of Aeneas’ journey from a decadent and failed East to a western frontier begins this story, for this is the legendary moment from which the Romans imagined and created a western center of the world. Aeneas’ journey and founding of Rome, indeed, represents a typological pattern, like Moses leaving Egypt to bring his exiled people from bondage to the promised land or like Augustus Caesar bringing new Rome into being after Civil War and political chaos. The Aeneid begins with the promise of Aeneas’ destiny to find Italy, “Arms and a man I sing, the first from Troy,/A fated exile to Lavinian shores/In Italy,”39 where the defeated Trojans would claim a new land and found an empire. Virgil characterizes this hard-won quest as driven by destiny: “They tossed on endless seas, went wandering,/Fate-driven, year on year around the world’s seas. It cost so much to found the Roman nation” (Aen. 1.31–3),40 and indeed this theme drives the epic forward almost as a narrative teleology that assumes the same political

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destiny as the Romans themselves.41 When Aeneas’ journey seems uncharted, his ever-vigilant mother Venus appeals to her father Jupiter, asking him to intercede, to which Jupiter responds assuring her that destiny has determined Aeneas’ promised future and the land he will occupy: Take heart—no one will touch the destiny Of your people. You will see Lavinium In its promised walls, and raise your brave Aeneas To the stars. No new thoughts change my purposes. But since you suffer, I will tell the future, Opening to the light fate’s secret book. In Italy your son will crush a fierce race In a great war. With the Rutulians beaten, Three winters and three summers he’ll shape walls And warrior customs, as he reigns in Latium. Aen. 1.257–6642

As a wraith, Creusa, Aeneas’ beloved Trojan wife, whom Aeneas had lost in his rapid abandonment of Troy, tells him that destiny decreed her death as part of the plan to find a new land in Italy, “It was by the will of heaven/This came about . . . . A prosperous kingdom and a royal wife/Are yours. So weep no longer, though you love me” (Aen. 2.777–8; 783–4).43 In Book 2, when Aeneas recounts the end of Troy to Dido, his parting from Troy, and the passage to unknown lands, he recalls how his father Anchises remembered that Cassandra prophesized that the destiny of the Trojan race was in “the West” or “Italy” (Aen. 3.185). Again, in Carthage, when Aeneas loses a sense of urgency about his promised future as he dallies with Dido, Jove intervenes, sending Mercury to remind Aeneas that he was “to rule Italy, beget an Empire/That roars with war, to give us noble Teucer’s/Descendants, who will bring the whole world laws” (Aen. 4.229–31).44 Finally from the land of the dead, Anchises tells Aeneas about the destined future of his line in Italy when Augustus Caesar would reign: “And here is the man so often promised you,/Augustus Caesar, a god’s son, and bringer/Of a new age of gold to Saturn’s old realm/Of Latium” (Aen. 6.791–4).45 Thus, combining myth and history, Virgil tells the story of a defeated city and a crushed realm. The legendary Aeneas, spurred by divine intervention, abandons Troy for the promised Italy, and the historic victory of Augustus Caesar over all enemies of Rome becomes the counter narrative that overturns this earlier defeat.

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Virgil features the theory of historical destiny when he has Aeneas’ father Anchises foretell the future of Rome from the land of the dead in Book 6 of the Aeneid: Come, hear your destiny, and the future glory Of the stock of Dardanus, all the descendants That we will have from the Italian race— Great souls who will be born into our family. Aen. 6.756–946

Written in the first century after Augustus’ defeat of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony at the Battle of Actium (31 BCE), this dizzying look back at history to prophecy Rome’s future provides the myth that legitimates Rome’s power. It describes the realization of a theory of historical destiny or teleological history, the sense of having arrived, which Anchises predicts in the fictional version of the foundation myth and which was Virgil’s version of the first-century historical truth. Details of this expanding destiny unfold when Anchises tells Aeneas about the future Roman Empire. He lays out the space of Rome’s imperial ambitions, taking the Roman territory even as far as India and to the lands Alexander the Great had failed to conquer (Aen. 6.789–800). Virgil’s land of the dead, “this shadowed squalor,/These depths of night” (“per umbras,/per loca senta situ cogunt noctemque profundam” [Aen. 6.461–2]), becomes an opportunity to project Roman imperial goals in the context of the political values of the first century of the Empire. Thus, Aeneas sees the dead, the refuse of war, and, reminded of the failure at Troy, he accepts the injunction to restore glory to the Trojans. Anchises presents this glory, the claiming of the world, to include the East as far as India, as the future of Rome. The teleology directing the prophecy is historical destiny realized as the Empire with its assumption that Roman superior high virtue will spread among all the conquered countries and peoples. This presents a stark contrast with Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” a view from the heavens rather than from the land of the dead from whence Anchises sees the future transcending the failures of the past. Scipio, on the other hand, points to the already conquered lands and questions the value of this achievement. Still, Virgil, while applauding the achievements of Augustus Caesar, also like Cicero, recognized the limits of human achievement. In Aeneid 6, when Aeneas asks Anchises about the beautiful youth with a sad face, “Father, who’s the companion of the hero?” (“quis, pater, ille, virum qui sic comitatur euntem?” [Aen. 6.863]), the one about whom “black Night wraps his head with its sad shadow” (“nox atra caput tristi circumvolat

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umbra” [Aen. 6.866]), an inevitable sadness that hovers over Rome’s people overshadows the exultant future history Anchises has predicted. Aeneas has asked about Marcellus, Augustus Caesar’s nephew and heir, about whom “Fate will give just a glimpse of him on earth” (“ostendent terris hunc tantum fata, nec ultra/ esse sinent” [Aen. 6.869–70]). This eulogy from Anchises for this promising young man, who would be cut down when he was a mere youth, mourns the unbreakable power of “cruel fate” (“fata aspera” [Aen. 6.882]) that inhabits Virgil’s poem like an unruly force that, unlike Rome’s neighboring lands and people, refuses to be disciplined, cannot be conquered, and possesses its own laws. Virgil provides the literary cornerstone of Rome’s imperial destiny with the Aeneid, despite the poet’s doubts about the future and about where the Empire would lead Rome. The painted shield presented to Aeneas in Book 8, an ekphrasis of the geographical and political reach of the Romans, lays out the future history of Rome as a prophetic vision of the lands to be occupied, depicting to the hero the people the Romans would conquer as a consequence of the Battle of Actium. As a depiction of Rome’s already achieved and future conquests, it reveals not just a future history but a teleology that makes Roman territorial ambitions in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and its future bellicose history depicted on a defensive weapon of war, the fundamental underpinning of its civic destiny. Rome conquers, overriding the differences in languages, clothes, customs, and battle gear, and brings the people from the Euphrates to the Rhine all under one universal rule: All kinds of clothing, weapons, And languages filed by in captive order: Leleges, loose-robed Africans, Carians, Nomads, Gelonian archers. The Euphrates Walked with meek waves; the two-horned Rhine walked by, The remote Morini, the Dahae now first conquered, And the Araxes, angry at his new bridge. Aen. 8.722–847

Thus, in Virgil’s poem, imposing Roman law, while dominating the world’s great rivers and the peoples that surround them, builds the empire, the central purpose of Rome’s historical destiny. In the Aeneid, Virgil prophesies about the pacification of the world and the land of the future Roman Empire. He lays out the specific territories, North, South, East, and West, that it would occupy and even goes so far as to include India of “gold” and “ivory” and the Ganges, tantalizing prizes that, while not lying beyond western ambitions, had not succumbed to western military adventurism,

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even though Alexander the Great had stretched his military reach to the Indus River.48 The Aeneid appears exultant about these future accomplishments of the Empire, many of which were realized in Virgil’s lifetime. But despite Virgil’s poetic claiming of the land and seeming deference to Augustus Caesar’s political ambition,49 the Aeneid festers with the suffering of war, ironically the consequence of the ideology of historical destiny. Virgil may indeed be the most powerful antiwar poet of the ancient world, with Book 2 of the Aeneid’s description of the fiery end of Troy and the brutality of war setting the stage for the story of Rome’s own bellicose history. Almost as a lesson or reminder both of past failure and of potential repetition, Book 2, telling the story of the destruction of Troy, dramatizes what happens to cities overrun by invading armies. In the Aeneid, reminders of the cost of military adventures shadow every seeming achievement of Roman-Trojan imperial expansion. Throughout the poem, warnings persist about the human incapacity to do precisely what Anchises tells Aeneas he must do, creating a somber and tragic refrain to accompany the hero’s triumphant claiming of Italian land. In Virgil’s view, we see that the human urge for vengeance haunts the grasp for glory: Children, don’t lose the horror of such warfare. Don’t run your massive strength against your country. You of the gods’ stock: take the lead, have mercy! My son, throw down your weapons! Aen. 6.832–550

Anchises implores Aeneas to live by the following rule: But Romans, don’t forget that world dominion Is your great craft: peace, and then peaceful customs; Sparing the conquered, striking down the haughty. Aen. 6.851–351

Yet, possessed by an irrational desire for revenge, Aeneas cannot spare the conquered even when he has already won the battle and the bride. Thus, Virgil shows that although the movement westward to claim a new land that would become the Roman Empire is built on the Roman ideals of law, piety, justice, and temperance that the poem celebrates, it is also founded on the intemperate and violent emotions of the hero who has carried the eastern ashes of Troy as a failed history within him. To be victorious, the Aeneid suggests, the Romans, bringing their defeated history with them, come West from the East and have to suppress the rights of others at the expense of virtue: it is this conflict and crisis of goals that Virgil synthesizes in the last scene of the poem when Aeneas kills Turnus.

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The Aeneid introduces multiple viewpoints, thus pointing to the complexity of historical reality and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reconciling its contradictions. Indeed, because of the poem’s contradictions, particularly given its “sense of regret over historical reality,”52 it is hard to see the Aeneid as only a song to the rightful historic destiny of Rome. In threatening the very center of the epic’s conviction about Rome’s foundation, the Aeneid may even express a “relativism” that cannot promise a secure future. As Adam Parry wrote in a canonical essay on the Aeneid, the public voice about Roman achievement is punctuated by the private voice of mourning.53 Thus, Virgil does not represent the status quo without tension; rather, his poem conveys a sense of incoherence and irresolution about the proclaimed goals of his Age. Yet, he adopts the idea of “historical destiny”—the movement West and the conquest of the disruptive regions around the Mediterranean, a position that Orosius, Augustine, and Dante will analyze, adopt, debate, and/or dispute. The Aeneid proclaims victory, but simultaneously conveys the cost of the conquest, for the Empire, Virgil shows, is built out of civil war, the suffering of war, and human intemperance,54 a cycle of violence that moves historic action in Virgil’s poem. This forms the basis for the questions that Augustine will also raise about the providential destiny of the Romans as told in the Aeneid. Augustine will seize on these inherent doubts about Roman achievement that Virgil reveals in the Aeneid to undermine its claims of an epochal turn.55 Like Virgil’s Aeneid, Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita also chronicles the history of the Romans. In contrast to Virgil, Livy claims that he will attach no importance to the mythological or poetic legends about the foundation of Rome, as not suited to history. Rather, he aspires to discuss the morals, lives, and policies of the men who made Rome, the wars and peace, and how the Empire was founded and expanded (1. Praef.). For him history is about lessons, in other words, history is “educational”: What chiefly makes the study of history wholesome and profitable is this, that you behold the lessons of every kind of experience set forth as on a conspicuous monument; from these you may choose for yourself and for your own state what to imitate, from these mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result. (1.Praef.10).56

Yet, beginning his history with the legendary story of Aeneas who together with Antenor was spared the vengeance of the Greeks at Troy (1.1), Livy too reads Augustus’ contemporary success in light of Rome’s mythological past. Thus, myth

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and mythological foundations become the means to assess the achievements of first-century Rome, with the present becoming the natural outcome of destiny. Impelled by this theory of historical destiny and chronicling 700 years of Rome’s political story from its legendary beginnings with Aeneas and the Romulus and Remus legends from whom the city takes its name, the Ab Urbe Condita declares the fundamental premise of the work in the title itself. Livy sets out to compose a factual particular history not based on myths as other works of the period have been. Yet, in celebrating the founding of the city of Rome to the death of Drusus in 9 BCE, Livy commemorates the deeds of the foremost people of the world, the achievements of the Roman people, from the fated foundation of the city: “But the Fates were resolved as I suppose, upon the founding of this great city, and the beginning of the mightiest empire, next after that of Heaven” (1.4.1).57 With the foundation of the new city, based on force of arms, law, statutes, and observances, Numa built the temple of Janus whose doors opened when Rome was at war and closed only when peace was achieved. Connecting this mythological beginning of Rome to the triumph of Augustus, Livy writes that the temple has been closed only three times: by Numa, after the First Punic War, and “after the battle of Actium, when the Emperor Augustus had brought about peace on land and sea” (1.19.3–4)58 to gain universal peace. Probably more than any other Roman literary work of the period, because it details the wars fought and the bloodshed, the Ab Urbe Condita lays out the foundation narrative of Rome. Livy’s book demonstrates, as Michel Serres has poetically portrayed it, that violence rules Rome and Rome rules with violence, “In the beginning, on the morning of foundation, there is battle and murder; there are two twins, two parallel stories, two groups, two hills, two flights of vultures. In the beginning then is violence. There is only one god, Mars, god of combat. Everything comes from him, resides in him, goes through him.”59 Indeed Livy’s story of Rome is a heroic epic in prose in the guise of history, going from 753 BCE to 9 CE in 142 books, of which only Books 1–10 and 31–45 survive.60 From the perspective of the present hegemony of the Romans, it glorifies Rome’s heroism and organizes its history around a series of wars from the city’s foundation to the subjugation of Italy, in the Punic Wars and the war against Hannibal, to the fight against Philip of Macedonia (Books 31–40), to the Social War (Books 41–80), to the Gallic War (Books 91–108), and from the beginning of the civil wars (Books 109–16) to the Battle of Actium (Books 117–33), when Caesar Augustus brought this history of warfare to an end (Books 134–42). These wars establish the Mediterranean basin boundaries of Roman space, and

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Livy champions the Roman virtues that achieved this Roman autonomy, as he records the careers of heroes like Scipio Africanus the Elder and his grandson. The conquest of the African threat in Carthage, the wild adventures of Hannibal and Alexander the Great that menaced Italy’s and Rome’s peace and prosperity continue the legendary opposition between the northern and southern, the eastern and western Mediterranean history of Rome. Livy features these other histories in order to highlight when, how, and why they failed, and how Rome pacified these bellicose others. Macedonia, Alexander the Great’s exploits, and the destruction of Carthage have particular relevance to this history of Rome. In Book 42, for example, he takes on Philip of Macedonia’s abortive attempt to crush Rome. He remembers how the Macedonians had “subdued all Europe” (“Europa omni domita”) and recalls their successful “crossing into unknown Asia” (“transgressi in Asiam incognitam”) to the farthest shores of India until there was nothing left for them to conquer (42.52.14–15). But now Macedonia itself is the prize as Romans seek to put Macedonia in slavery so that “there might be no king neighboring the Roman Empire, that no people famed in war might keep its arms” (42.52).61 On the eve of the conquest of the Macedonians, the contrast with the earlier empire serves to establish Roman right and merit on the one hand and the deficiencies and inadequacies of those conquered on the other. To the Romans, Alexander’s Macedonia represents a shadow Empire to their own, a reminder of the turns of history and how decadence can destroy politicalmilitary success. In addition, the history of the Macedonian Empire provides a pointed example of potential limitations to the Romans, for Alexander had brought under his control the Persian Empire, and then moved on to Arabia and India, where the Indian Ocean meets the uttermost ends of the Earth. But when Alexander died, the empire was “dismembered,” providing a chilling reminder of the ephemeral nature of military power and imperial aggrandizement: At that time the Empire and the name of the Macedonians was the greatest on Earth; thereafter at the death of Alexander it was torn into many kingdoms, as each leader snatched at resources for his own account, and its strength was dismembered; yet it endured for a hundred and fifty years from the topmost pinnacle of its fortune to its final end. Ab Urbe Condita 45.9.5–662

In referring to the demise of the Macedonian Empire, Livy implies his own doubts about the finality of Roman achievement, for to introduce the repetitive cycles of history returns to a stoic idea of the ineluctable drive of destiny or fate.

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After Alexander’s death, the Macedonian Empire gave way to the Roman surge. The potential for cyclical history to take the place of linear teleological history follows from Livy’s return to the discussion of Alexander. In addition, and more pointed perhaps, is the rapid decline from great power revealed in the de casibus history of Alexander and the Macedonian Empire, both a forewarning and a record of how transitory military and political ascendance can be, addressed to an audience glowing in the “epochal” victory at Actium. As with other imperial ideologies, the Romans believed that they were moving outward to crush their neighbors in order to bring civilization, stability, the rule of law, and justice,63 as Livy boasts in the context of the discussion of Alexander: “A thousand battle-arrays more formidable than those of Alexander and the Macedonians have the Romans beaten off—and shall do—if only our present love of domestic peace endure and our concern to maintain concord” (9.19.17).64 While clearly lauding Roman superiority, Livy still expresses anxiety that the present reign of virtue—the desire to have peace and concord—might not last. Although Augustan Rome represents an ideal political achievement to Livy, he is not so arrogant that he believes that history has indeed ended, that the utopian political state has arrived. As Livy writes in the preface to the work, since Rome’s early achievements were a result of discipline, humility, and thrift, virtues he sees disappearing in the present (Praef. 11–12), he hopes history can provide “lessons” to check these tendencies. Like Virgil, this candor reveals pessimism about history and about Rome’s future.65 It cannot be denied that Livy and Virgil express anxieties about historical and human intractability, even though they respect the emperor’s success in ending the civil war. But their stoic critique implies the repetitiveness of history and this introduces doubts about Rome and its future, and even about the idea of historical destiny, for if history is subject to cycles of rising and falling, no epochal events have any staying power. The Neronian poets, particularly Lucan (39–65 CE), are pointed in their critique of military expansionism and the betrayal of the Republic. Lucan directly criticizes the Roman imperialist program; his Pharsalia, though unfinished, is framed as a verse chronicle of Julius Caesar’s defeat of the Republic and its leader, Pompeius Magnus. For Lucan, in contrast to Virgil’s poetic voice in the Aeneid, the gods do not govern humans, “In very truth there are no gods who govern mankind; though we say falsely that Jupiter reigns, blind chance sweeps the world along.”66 Lucan’s historical theory rejects “destiny” and “cycles” in favor of “blind chance.” The importance of Lucan’s Pharsalia, like Virgil’s Aeneid to the Latin West cannot be overestimated. Both poems functioned simultaneously as authorities on history, geography, and

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poetry during the medieval period,67 and Lucan’s counter-argument to Virgil’s Aeneid presented a corrective that raised questions about imperial ambitions similar to Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio.” Although a number of first-century Roman writers express a profound tension about Roman imperialism as scholars have emphasized in their studies for the last half century,68 Virgil and Livy still cannot break loose from their conviction that Rome is caput mundi. They create their own mythologized history from the perspective of the present, seeing its achievements as part of the Roman destiny, yet remain worried about the betrayal of their own best institutions. In spite of their reservations about the empire and concern about its imprudence, injustice, intemperance, and vulnerability, Virgil and Livy nonetheless sponsor the myth that the city of Rome is destined to rule the world. Their works create an intellectual and aesthetic foundation for universalizing the Roman civilizing ideology, and at the same time, they present Rome’s destiny as teleological, with its heroes as historical and political allegories, who carry Rome’s destiny forward to a yet to happen but already realized history. Thus, the writers do not merely tell the story of how Rome was born, they create and promote the myth of Rome’s destined history. As David Quint has correctly argued, although “the Aeneid uncovers the contradiction of the Augustan ideology that shapes it,” it still appropriates the Roman ideology, making it “a given political and social arrangement” that appears “inevitable” and “predetermined,”69 as something “taken for granted.” This cultural (and political) achievement of Livy and Virgil rather than the actual military gain of the Romans serves as the prompt to Orosius, Augustine, and Dante for debate, contest, and confrontation with their legacy. The Hebrew Bible, as a chronicle and deliberation on the meaning of the history of the Hebrew/Israelite people, does not end with a return from exile or with the installation of a reign of peace as heralded for the Romans in Virgil and Livy. Ruled by foreign powers or exiled in foreign lands, the audience for the prophetic texts exhorting loyalty to the Lord must substitute a place and a land with the solace of retaining their historic identity with a specific God rather than with any political order or destined history. For them, the primary purpose of their history is to demonstrate their fidelity to Yahweh and to his commands. In this lies the striking difference between the Roman and Jewish legacy handed over to the future. Nonetheless, both traditions inscribe the idea of divine destiny or providence driving history and thus share an authoritative role in framing the future cultural and political history of this idea in the western world. As the above discussion attempts to demonstrate, countering these promises about

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land and destinies under divine patronage in these two traditions is a consistent reminder that promises or not, retaining the land and staying true or faithful to the ideals of the particular world view adopted may be elusive.

Rome against Jerusalem in the first century of the Common Era New Testament scholars argue that the passion and crucifixion provide the core events from which the gospels develop their narrative versions of the story of Jesus.70 But another historic event, not directly mentioned in the gospels, provides a central element of the narrative strategy of the texts that would emerge as the canon of Christian Scriptures four centuries later. With the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and of the second temple (70 CE), both Jewish and Christian writers (in various configurations of Christian-Jews, Jewish-Christians, traditional Jews, Hellenized Jews, gentile converts to Judaism or to Christianity),71 were forced to confront the meaning of history, particularly in light of the political and geographical turmoil created when the Romans smashed Jerusalem. For, the gospels and the New Testament texts written after 70 (which only excludes the Pauline corpus) as well as for the contemporary writer Josephus (37–100 CE), the Hellenistic Jewish historian, the destruction of the temple frames Jewish history and contemporary events. In fact, it has been persuasively argued (and this could apply to the entire history of the Jews as told in the Hebrew Bible) that “messianic-chiliastic movements are frequently reactions of an oppressed people to a politically imposed foreign culture in which the injured sense of self-esteem within the dominated culture seeks to assert itself.”72 This reality most certainly applies to the complex social situation in first-century Palestine, as well as to other periods in the history of the Jews. Facing the reality of the Roman military and political victories and inspired by the purported and witnessed death and resurrection of Jesus, followers of the new sect that is emerging from Judaism, confront the meaning of inherited ideas about divine providence to propose a new understanding of God’s purposes in history. Josephus, in Jewish Antiquities,73 written during this critical moment in the history of the Jews, retells the Hebrew Bible as the history of its people from creation to Daniel, even coming up to his own present time. Although Josephus resists divine explanations and tends to rationalize events, preferring instead to use reported speech and explanations that proclaim divine intervention,

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following the prompts of the Hebrew Bible, he still resorts to the idea of divine providence to explain salvific events central to the biblical Jewish histories. For example, writing of Moses’ divine selection to save his people during their sojourn in the desert, he remembers the divinity’s granting of favors (3.2.7), for God promises to take care of the Israelites (3.5.24). When they are hungry, He provides food (3.5.25), and when they are agonized with thirst, the Lord provides a spring (3.7.35). Writing about the rise of David’s kingdom, Josephus repeatedly emphasizes David’s divine election, for David did nothing without an oracle or command of God (7.iv.1.72); his affairs prosper by the will of God (7.4.90) who gives David victory (7.4.109), but God also looks unfavorably on his marriage to Bathsheba and the ignominious deeds that led to it (7.3.147). Saved from the lion by the deity and His providence, Daniel’s election makes him impervious to nefarious plots and safe from the threatened death in the lions’ den (10.6.260). In fact, one could argue that in Jewish Antiquities, Josephus has shown God’s favor to the Israelites, in spite of deportation and exile. However, in The Jewish War, a title that links the work to other Roman wars of conquest, like “The Punic War” or “The Gallic War,” as in Livy, he brings the history of the Jews up to his own times. Here, Josephus provides a gripping and gruesome portrayal of the fall of Jerusalem that he attributes to the divine providence now patronizing the Romans. Following a Deuteronomic polemic to explain the forces of history arrayed against the Jewish people, he writes, describing the end of the temple, “Reflecting on these things one will find that God has a care for man and by all kinds of premonitory signs shows His People the way of salvation, while they owe their destruction to folly and calamities of their own choosing” (6.4.310–311). Interpreting the meaning of these events in the Deuteronomic mode, Josephus explains, “Here we may signally discern at once the power of God over unholy men and the fortune of the Romans” (6.4.399). Providing the most vivid description of Titus’ capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, Josephus tells of the murderous rampage, “While the temple blazed, the victors plundered everything that fell in their way and slaughtered wholesale all who were caught. No pity was shown for age, no reverence for rank; children and greybeards, laity and priests, alike were massacred; every class was pursued and encompassed in the grasp of war, whether suppliants for mercy or offering resistance” (6.5.1.271). In Josephus’ simplistic explanation of historical forces, political and military victory emanates from divine support and loss derives from the withdrawal of the divinity, often as a consequence of treacherous wrongdoing, a failure he attributes to the Jews as they fall to the Romans. Josephus’ histories, like the Hebrew Bible itself, tell

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of a lachrymose history that ends with conquest and exile, which Josephus, as a pro-Roman former governor of Galilee, blames on the rebelliousness and perfidy of the Jews themselves. As a literary response to exile and displacement as well as to radical loss, the New Testament, obviously with the exception of the Pauline epistles, was written after the destruction of the Temple and the expulsion of the Jews from Israel (70 CE). Unlike the Deuteronomic histories, however, it questions whether any place, temporal history, or particular group of people possesses a special or exceptional status. This alien or exilic condition that informs much of the New Testament encourages a more flexible approach to time, space, and identity that fundamentally differs from the political-military projects of the Deuteronomic histories and certainly of the Roman Empire, even though Roman citizenship provided a more abstract notion of belonging than tribal or national identity had. This shift in approach to land, time, and identity collides with the status of the temple and Jerusalem as historic places imbued with sacred significance. The historic reality of the destruction of the temple, as mentioned above, in the New Testament appears as a prophecy that of course had already transpired. In contrast to the heraldic achievement of the Romans featured in Virgil’s Aeneid that predicts the already realized victory of the Romans at Actium, the end of civil war, and installation of a reign of peace, the New Testament follows the crucifixion of its central figure by Roman officials and is marked by the Romans’ crushing defeat of the Jews, of Jerusalem, and the end of the temple, already achieved when the gospels were written. The cleansing of the temple, an event that occurs in all four gospels (Matt. 21.12–13, Mark 11.15–17, Luke 19.45–6, and John 2.13–17) in which Jesus chases the moneylenders from the temple precinct emerges as the pivotal event leading to his confrontation with the authorities. In John’s version, it occurs at the beginning of the gospel, and in a sense functions as the spur to the unfolding narrative: Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple precincts he found the dealers in cattle, sheep, and pigeons, and the money-changers seated at their tables. He made a whip of cords and drove them out of the temple, sheep, cattle, and all. He upset the tables of the money-changers, scattering their coins. Then he turned on the dealers in pigeons: “Take them out of here,” he said, “do not turn my Father’s house into a market.” His disciples recalled the words of scripture: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” The Jews challenged Jesus: “What sign can you show to justify your action?” “Destroy this temple,” Jesus replied, “and in three days I will raise it up again.” John 2.13–19

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Jesus’ admonition that John inscribes makes the temple and Jerusalem expendable as real places, for a symbolic temple can replace them. With eschatological prophecy about the pending destruction of the temple appearing in all the synoptic gospels when Jesus predicts that “not one stone will be left upon another; they will all be thrown down” (“non relinquetur lapis super lapidem qui non destruatur” [Mark 13.2; cf. Matt. 24.1–2; Luke 21.5–6]), the gospels reject the symbolic and political force of the temple and of Jerusalem as historic sites imbued with political or religious value. To replace these icons of cultural force, the gospels offer a “universal” timelessspaceless belonging, created by a “faith” community. In the Pauline epistles, Paul, a diasporic Jew, like Josephus, also Hellenized, emerges as a critic of his own Judaism. As Daniel Boyarin and others have argued, and I would agree, Paul never rejected his Judaism,74 but he was profoundly committed to the idea of the oneness of humanity and as a consequence he was “troubled by, critical of, the ‘ethnocentrism’ of biblical and postbiblical religion and particularly the way it created hierarchies between nations, genders, social classes.”75 Nonetheless, it would be a mistake, as many have argued, to posit that this led Paul to reject what he considered the divine revelation to the Jewish people.76 Paul’s rejection of conventional hierarchies, in a sense, not unlike the prophets, aspires to universalism, yet remains committed to the particular revelation of the Hebrew Bible. For Paul, the “human” just identity was radically different from Roman citizenship. Paul continues his commitment to the legacy of biblical ideas about “universal” justice, while substituting tribal, national, and gender identities with the “body of Christ,” which becomes a sacramental means to create unity out of plurality.77 Among New Testament texts, Luke and Luke-Acts, the most historic in the collection in the sense that Luke refers specifically to events occurring in Rome that coincide with the narrative of Jesus’ life (e.g. Augustus Caesar’s census, Luke 2.1, and the reign of Tiberius, Luke 3.1), represents a shift from the idea of providential historical and political salvation for a people to individual redemption, open to everyone. When the silenced Zechariah speaks for the first time following the birth of his son John, his prophecy about the coming “deliverer from the house of his [God’s] servant David” (“et erexit cornu salutis nobis in domo David pueri sui” [Luke 1.69]), promised by the prophets through the ages (Luke 1.70–5) includes his own child as the forerunner of the Lord who will “prepare his way and lead his people to a knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins” (“parare vias eius/ad dandam scientiam salutis

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plebi/eius in remissionem peccatorum eorum” [Luke 1.76–7]). Zechariah’s prophetic speech recalls the divine covenant with Abraham to deliver his people from enemies and from fear, but he signals a new dispensation, deliverance through forgiveness of sins, not unlike the prophets Jeremiah, Isaiah, or Ezekiel, who turn away from a providential history of the Israelites to a divine destiny for humans based on righteous action that is distinct from particularities of race, ethnicity, gender, geography, nation, etc. Indeed, Luke, in keeping with these catholic claims, closes the gospel with a proclamation to the world that emphasizes the universality of the message that comes out from Jerusalem: “ ‘So you see,’ he said, ‘that scripture foretells the sufferings of the Messiah and his rising from the dead on the third day, and declares that in his name repentance bringing the forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed to all nations beginning from Jerusalem’ ’’ (Luke 24.46–7).78 Symbolized by the events at Pentecost (Acts 2.1–11), when language barriers disappear to break down the boundaries that cultural and geographical difference creates, Acts continues the commitment to this idea, quoting Peter as having preached “God has no favorites, but that in every nation those who are god-fearing and do what is right are acceptable to him” (Acts 10.34).79 This proclamation constitutes the quintessential universalist claim of Luke’s texts as a new binary between the God-fearing and Godshunning. Already appearing in Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, as well as in the letters of Paul, this claim replaces the old dispensations of ethnicity, citizenship, and the particularities of tribe. The Revelation of John (c.90 CE, hereafter Apocalypse of John) even in its visionary mode nonetheless is clear in its political attack of Rome, the “great whore” (“meretricis magnae” [Apoc. 17.1]), the new Babylon, which is pitted against the “new Jerusalem, the Holy City, coming out of heaven from God” (“civitatem sanctam Hierusalem/ descendentem de caelo a Deo” [Apoc. 21.10]). Chapter 17 launches a polemical diatribe against Rome, the “great whore,” who sits atop seven hills while “holding sway over the kings of the earth” (“habet regnum super reges terrae” [Apoc. 17.18]). Here John’s vision not only indicts Rome but also offers a meditation on the nature of political evil itself: “Babylon is more than Rome. It is the city of this world where Christians dwell as they journey to the new promised land, the new Jerusalem. It is the place of exile and alienation for Christians.”80 Quoting from Isaiah and Jeremiah, the following two chapters (18.1–19.10) focus on the vision of the fall of Babylon. The apocalyptic-typed character, the intermediary angel, proclaims that Babylon has fallen and that all the nations have drunk the wine of God’s anger roused by

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her fornication, the kings of the earth have fornicated with her, and the world’s merchants grown rich on her wealth and luxury (Apoc. 18.3). The intertexts are particularly pointed because they bring together allusions to the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, which resonate with the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE: “Fallen, fallen is Babylon” (“cecidit cecidit Babylon magna” [Apoc. 18.2; Isa. 21.9]).81 In addition to linking Jerusalem and Babylon, the context of the intertexts, Babylon as Rome, makes the two cities alike, both having crushed Jerusalem, as Augustine will later write, they are the same city, for they are both betrayers of the city of God. In an enraged political diatribe, with the textual allusions to Isaiah and Jeremiah (Isa. 23.17; Jer. 51.7–8) and the Babylonian destruction of the first temple, John the Divine has made the 586 BCE destruction and exile equal to the 70 CE sacking, set the agenda for an excoriation of powerful cities, while making Rome and Babylon coequal partners in pillage, murder, and rapine. The intertexts suggest that secular history possesses a bad habit of rescidivism. With the vision of an end-time in the new Jerusalem, only sacred history escapes the cycles of history. With the kingdom of God projected into an eschatological future, Pauline, Petrine, and Johannine Christianity offer, instead of tribe and place, a timelessspaceless “belonging”82 in this world. Like Roman citizenship, it provides a universal status to replace the loss of the idea of clan or of religious, ethnic, and national identities. The resultant “homelessness” or alien status is replaced by the Christian “home,” a notion that relies on the privileged status accorded to symbolic readings of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. “Exile” becomes a metaphor for the human condition in an allegorical reading of Gen. 1–3, the exile narrative theme of Exodus, and the prophets, particularly Ezekiel and Isaiah, rather than actual displacement even if literal exile may have contributed to this metaphoric conception of space. The abstract notion of place and community provides the means to unify the various ethnic groups and diverse geographies that comprised the universal Church. The early Church provided the Christian “family” for identity, “homes” or churches as liminal spaces for community,83 and the promise of future salvation to replace biological, familial, clan, local, and civic identities. As Paul, the quintessential exile—a diaspora Jew and then a follower of a minor sect (comprised of Jewish-Christians, ChristianJews, and gentile Christians)—writes, quoting Isaiah (28.16) in the Letter to the Romans, “No one who has faith in him will be put to shame: there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, because the same Lord is Lord of all, and has riches enough for all who call on him” (Rom. 10.11–13 [12]).84 In the Letter to the

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Corinthians, turning “temple” into a metaphor, he again states that the people of God are God’s temple: “Surely you know that you are God’s temple, where the spirit of God dwells. Anyone who destroys God’s temple will himself be destroyed by God because the temple of God is holy; and you are that temple” (1 Cor. 3.16– 17).85 This idea is repeated in the Gospel of John (John 4.21),86 and in John the Divine’s vision in Apocalypse of John: “I saw no temple in the city: for its temple was the sovereign Lord God and the Lamb” (Apocalypse of John 21.22).87 The following pericope heralding the “glory of God” that brings light to the world’s nations quotes from Isaiah (Isa. 60.3, 5, 19–20) to proclaim divine sovereignty over all. Here a transcendent God, who is everywhere, replaces a particular place of worship. The “temple” becomes the believer and the community of believers, while distinctions between Jew and non-Jew disappear from the perspective of the universal identity the divinity offers. This abstract notion of place, time, and people would come to challenge the idea of divine destiny for any place or particular people defined by citizenship or ethnicity and replace it with the divine purpose for all individual humans. Although Christian identity by the fourth century had emerged as different from Roman citizenship, when Emperor Constantine legalized Christian practice in the Empire (313 CE), Eusebius and Lactantius wed the Roman to the Christian narrative in an attempt to sweep aside the differences. The early Church (first and second centuries) had appealed to diasporic, alienated, homeless, or exiled people held together by common interests and convictions, based on a “set of beliefs.”88 Like the concept of “Roman citizenship,” these communal beliefs and practices served to overcome both ethnic and tribal affiliations that a shared clan history had previously sustained. Orosius, Augustine, and Dante inherit these literary, spiritual, and political traditions with which they grapple in their own works. The remaining chapters will now turn to how these ideas were rewritten and reinterpreted in these later historic times.

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. . . Before the founding of the City . . . ante urbem conditam Orosius, History against the Pagans (1.14) For Orosius, human intemperance explains all the darkness of history, the sufferings that God inflicts for failing to live according to his will (2.1.1–2). Demurring to Paul’s Letter to the Romans, he accepts that everything comes from God (“All authority comes from God” [“Non est enim potestas nisi a Deo,” Rom. 13.1]), as he sets out to find a pattern for human history that can be inserted into a divinely orchestrated universal time that is moving inevitably toward the end time, but in a process of improvement, no matter how dark and dismal his own present moment in history may argue against such optimism.1 Several fundamental ideas inform Orosius’ historical theory: (1) God is one; (2) God is the creator of the world and of mankind; (3) God is providence and is occupied with his creation; and (4) the providence of God operates in history with a slow and almost incomprehensible economy, but it infallibly functions and two moments clarify this disclosure: the Incarnation of Christ and after the Incarnation, the Christian revelation.2 Following the biblical model of universal history from Daniel, Orosius organizes history into the four great empires, based on Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a giant statue of a man (Dan. 2.31–45), whose head was gold, chest and arms silver, belly and thighs bronze, legs made of iron, and feet part iron and clay (Dan. 2.32–3). Daniel too adheres to a providential view of history, telling the king, “Your majesty, the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom with its power, its might, and its honour” (Dan. 2.37). The descending ages are usually taken to signify the Babylonian, Median, Persian, and Macedonian Empires. In Book 2, following the Pauline

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premise that all authority comes from God (Rom. 13.1), and Daniel’s similar concept of divine power over all, Orosius explains his conception of history, to sustain the divine legitimacy of the Roman regnum, the latter word his choice over imperium.3 Orosius, who does not cite Daniel’s text directly, although Jerome’s and Hippolytus’ commentaries on Daniel may have been his sources, makes these four kingdoms the Babylonian, Macedonian, Carthaginian, and Roman Empires (Hist. 2.1). Jerome had not made the fourth kingdom Rome in contrast to Hippolytus (170–236 CE), bishop of Rome, who, in his commentary on Daniel, had identified Daniel’s fourth beast with the Romans (Dan. 7.7), predicting the imminent end of time with Roman hegemony.4 Clearly Orosius does not share Hippolytus’ scorn for Rome, and he introduces a radical innovation, because he brackets the African and Macedonian realms, which were of brief duration (Hist. 2.1.6), and argues that the first and last of the kingdoms, Babylon and Rome are the most important. Like an old father to a young son, Babylon in a perfect temporal symmetry, he writes, gave way to Rome, which had already begun to rise as the first fell (Hist. 2.1.6). Inserting God as the director of these risings and fallings (Hist. 2.2.4), he makes the Macedonian and Carthaginian Empires transitional and Rome unique because it had opened itself to Christianity. Thus, he synchronizes the history of the world’s “civilizations” with both Jewish and Christian history (Hist. 1.1.14).5

Fourth-century Roman Empire: Imperium and evangelium When the Emperor Constantine ended persecution of Christians and legalized Christianity in the early fourth century (313 CE),6 he simultaneously intertwined imperium and evangelium. The Christian apologists for Constantine and the Empire, Eusebius and Lactantius, created a strand of Christian providential political theory that Orosius’ History would develop further at the moment when Rome faced a major threat to its survival as city and Empire in the early fifth century.7 In Orosius’ theory, the Incarnation occupies the central moment of history, and because it occurred at the pivotal time when Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor took a census of Roman citizens, Orosius makes the Roman imperium and the Christ event intrinsic to the divine plan. Following Eusebius,8 Orosius writes, “After the Redeemer of the world, the Lord Jesus Christ, came on earth and was enrolled in Caesar’s census as a Roman citizen, . . . the gates of war,

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closed” (Hist. 7.3.4).9 Peace was installed. Thus, one could argue, that for Orosius the birth of Christ, the “Christianorum caput” (“Head of the Christians” [Hist. 7.3.2]), who had been born to save the good and punish the bad, was confirmation of the primacy of Rome’s destiny. This particular version of incarnational history circumscribes the theology of the Incarnation to a temporal event and among other lapses fails to understand its potential meaning beyond particular historical circumstances. But for Orosius, it signaled an epochal change that coincided with Roman imperial victory and produced what would become the dominant Latin western theory of Christian providential history, in which a new time begins with the birth of Christ and the Roman regnum under Augustus Caesar.10 This becomes the political, historical, and theological argument that Dante adopts as the cornerstone of the Monarchia. The link between imperium and evangelium that Eusebius and Lactantius articulated had appeared as early as the second century in Melito of Sardis,11 and it would continue both as a theme and as a concrete politics to the High Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.12 It became a crucial element of the ideology of many early modern European monarchies where ruler and God were aligned in processes of nation-building, geographical expansion, religious evangelizing, or colonial conquests. In fact, one could propose that it was Napoleon who finally overturned this theory while making himself temporal ruler of his own imperial domain. Orosius’ historical theory stems from the political and intellectual developments of the previous century, when, despite the fact that by most scholarly assessments, in the early fourth century Christians were a minority population of the Roman Empire,13 Constantine took the world by surprise. According to Eusebius (c.260 CE–c.340 CE), he attributed his victory against Maxentius in the battle for Milvian Bridge outside Rome on October 24, 312, to the vision of the cross in the sky he had witnessed before the battle. “He said he saw with his own eyes, up in the sky and resting over the sun, a cross-shaped trophy formed from light, and a text attached to it, which said, ‘By this conquer.’ ’’14 This event, which Eusebius interpreted in terms of divine providence, led to Constantine’s victory, to the end of persecutions of Christians, to Constantine’s conversion, and to the eventual Christianization of the Roman Empire. The theology of providential destiny as Eusebius and Lactantius develop it argues for a type of teleology in history that recognizes God’s interest, guidance, and intervention into the events of human history, thus making history

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teleological rather than arbitrary, chaotic, discontinuous, or cyclical. While the victories Constantine won on the field gave him absolute power in the Empire, he was the political beneficiary of the cultural legacy of the Virgilian imperium and the Hebrew biblical historical narratives that the Christian theologians of the fourth century had intellectually transformed to support their version of providential history. For Lactantius and Eusebius, Constantine’s victory represented a decisive epochal event in which the history of the past terminated and a whole new era had begun. But, while they applauded the Christianization of the Empire as a demonstration of divine providence, they did not question the status quo, that is, the imperial structure itself, which, for them, continued as “the undiscussed,” that is, “the taken for granted.” Constantine’s attribution of his victory at the Milvian Bridge to the Christian God contrasts with the common reaction a century later when Alaric sacked Rome. While on both occasions, victories and defeats were attributed to gods, in the fifth century, Rome’s weakness before the barbarian threat was blamed on Christians and the Christian Empire. Pagan Roman beliefs resurfaced as means to understand Rome’s vulnerability, while fear of conquest before the barbarian onslaught prompted Romans to view Alaric’s crushing success as resulting from Roman abandonment of the pagan divinities in favor of Christianity. In part, these allegations prompted Augustine to write the City of God and Orosius his history against the pagans, both works that seek to come to terms theologically with the relationship between Christian narrative and Christian versions of Jewish history and the temporal political order in the form of the Roman Empire. Thus, in the fifth century after Alaric’s attack, the idea of the providential Christianization of the Roman Empire was directly confronted and at the same time, at least Augustine and Orosius, probed the divine interest in the Roman imperium. Orosius could look back to Livy and Virgil for the imperium argument and to Lactantius (c.240 CE–c.320 CE) and Eusebius to tie imperium with evangelium. Lactantius had rekindled Virgil and Livy’s idea that Rome was destined to rule the world. Together with Eusebius, Lactantius also resuscitated the idea of “divine vengeance,” as witnessed in a number of biblical narratives in Genesis and Exodus, through which the enemies of God and Christ would perish. Made public between 305 CE and 310 CE, Lactantius’ Divine Institutions, it has been persuasively argued, was a “manifesto for political and religious reform.”15 The work is steeped in classical poetry, mythology, and philosophy that Lactantius puts at the service of Christianity. In fact, a trained rhetorician, Lactantius pays greater heed to classical culture without pitting it against Christian tradition than

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any other Christian writer of the period.16 Intellectually struggling to restore the Empire in the form of Augustus’ reign, Lactantius turns to Virgil to recall the first century’s Golden Age: It is therefore clear that it is on the earth that he was king; this is affirmed more clearly elsewhere: “He instituted a golden age, he who in his turn, will possess the lands of Latium, the ancient realm of Saturn.”17

The first to interpret Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue allegorically as Christian prophecy, Lactantius links the Sibylline Oracle with Isaiah’s prophecy: “The Lord of His own accord will give you a sign; it is this: A young woman is with child, and she will give birth to a son and call him Immanuel” (Isa. 7.14), which Christians were already interpreting as having prophesized the coming redeemer.18 Lactantius reads the Eclogue as a prophecy of a thousand years of happiness that would procure the return of the terrestrial reign of Christ.19 Lactantius’ chiliastic interpretation of the Eclogue that predicts the birth of a child, who will herald a new age,20 identifies the infant of the Eclogue with the infant Jesus. Appropriating the authority of Virgil, Lactantius’ interpretation of the Fourth Eclogue makes Virgil a Christian prophet and simultaneously ties Hebrew messianic expectation to Christian eschatological hope and Roman political ambition. This marriage of Virgilian oracle to Isaiah’s prophecy endured for centuries, and although Orosius ignores it, Augustine hesitantly finds Christian resonances in Virgil’s words (City of God 10.27), while Dante will later interpret the Virgin in the line “Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna” (“Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns” [Monarchia 1.11.1]) as a personification for Justice, when during the “reign of Saturn,” the Roman Golden Age, a period of political justice prevailed. Eusebius, on the other hand, combines biblical notions of God’s providential guidance of the Hebrew people with the goals of the Empire to remake the founding myth of the Romans. Eusebius also uses the first census of the Roman world that links the Jesus narrative to Roman politics (Luke 2.1) to wed Christianity to the Empire. Luke’s connection of the birth of Jesus with the reign of Augustus provides Eusebius the means to establish Jesus’ birth date and place in Palestine and under Roman rule.21 Eusebius, like Lactantius, adopts the idea that God orchestrated Augustus’ reign to prepare the world for Jesus’ teaching. He also makes Christian universalist teaching that stripped away the differences between Greek and non-Greek and simultaneously conquered polytheism parallel the political achievement of the Roman Empire proposing that the power of Christ overcame polyarchy and polytheism to install one kingdom

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of God over Greeks, barbarians, and all humans everywhere, with the Roman Empire abolishing the need for multiple governments and merging all humans into one unified government.22 Writing a historical narrative with convenient chronological coincidences, by inserting divine providence, Eusebius constructs a parallelism between Christ’s soteriological role and Constantine’s political rise to power. As H. A. Drake writes, “By yoking the mission of Rome to subdue barbarians on earth with Christ’s divine mission to fight demons in the spiritual world, Eusebius fused what had been a simple chronological correlation into a powerful, cosmic model of causation, a ‘political theology’ that equated polytheism with polyarchy and division, monotheism with monarchy and unity.”23 As inventor of ecclesiastical history, as Arnaldo Momigliano pointed out 50 years ago, Eusebius created the idea of the Christian nation. Here Christ and Christians were the good and true and their enemies were the devil, heresy, and the persecution of Christians.24

Orosius Orosius follows the providential theory developed by Eusebius and Lactantius and therefore disagrees with Augustine, even though he claims he has followed Augustine’s prompts. In fact, the diversity of their views has led some to suggest that despite the fact that Orosius claims Augustine asked him to write the book, he either did not understand Augustine or that he deliberately opposed him.25 Orosius’ concept of history makes the past the preparation for the present, the means for evaluating contemporary events, and in turn, the present becomes the realization of the past. As preparation for the present, the past can also feature its ideological or moral significance for the time when he writes; in fact, he records historical events as a way to understand the present; all present events result from the moral failures or successes of the past; virtue is the measure of human success or failure. Thus, as in Livy, history becomes the source of lessons and the present the achievement of epochal events, while Christian belief in the Incarnation and redemption provide the theological apparatus for judging historical action. In contrast to other patristic writers, he does not apply the broad interpretive strategies we find from Paul to Origen to Augustine that engage literal, typological, allegorical, or symbolic readings to understand biblical texts.26 Rather, he stays within the realm of the literal and historical, applying Christian belief as the underpinning of his story of Roman Christian victory over adversaries.

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Coming from Iberia to North Africa, Orosius arrived in Hippo, ardent in the struggle against heresy (Priscillianism and Pelagianism), to study with Augustine, and later he went on to Jerusalem accompanied by a letter (dated 415 CE) in which Augustine commended him to Jerome’s care. Augustine writes, suggesting that to him the danger of heresy in Iberia was more threatening than the barbarian invasions, “Just now Orosius has come to me, a religious young man, a brother in the Catholic fold, in age a son, in dignity a fellow priest, alert of mind, ready of speech, burning with eagerness, longing to be a useful vessel in the house of the Lord, in order to refute the false and pernicious teachings which have been much more deadly to the souls of Spaniards than the sword of the barbarian has been to their bodies.”27 After his sojourn with Jerome and further struggles against Pelagianism in Palestine, Orosius was on his way home to Iberia as the Vandal invasions began. He returned to North Africa as a refugee, fleeing the “barbarian invaders” behind him, and it was at this point that Augustine was supposed to have commissioned him to write his apologetic history of Rome as an expansion of the historical summary in the first five books of the City of God, the first 10 books of which having been recently published. No record of an Augustine response to Orosius’ History exists, and given its extensive deviations from Augustine’s views, this should not surprise us. For example, in contrast to Orosius, for Augustine, the present is not necessarily an improvement on the past; there is no necessary cause and effect between human actions and divine punishment on earth; Augustine does not present history as four great realms; he scorns ideas of sacrosanct rulers; he is full of reservations about Rome and its history.28 Orosius, unlike Augustine, embraced his Roman citizenship and did not identify himself by ethnicity or region; rather, and testifying to his adherence to the universal vision of the Empire and of Christianity, he identified himself by religion and citizenship as “I, as a Roman and a Christian, approach Christians and Romans” (“Christianos et Romanos Romanus et Christianus accedo” [Hist. 5.2.3]). Orosius’ history occupies a formative role in the unfolding of western history and historical theory for a number of reasons. Certainly, because of Augustine’s position in the late fourth and early fifth century, Orosius’ claimed connection to the bishop of Hippo gives significant authority to the work, not just when he wrote but also into the millennium that followed him. Also, his work is believed to be the first intellectual response to the first five books of Augustine’s City of God.29 Orosius makes full use of the authority conferred on him through the connection to Augustine, for he addresses Augustine in the “Prologue” and states that it was he who had assigned him the task of writing the work, “I have

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obeyed your bidding, most blessed Father Augustine.” He also announces that already Augustine has examined whether he was capable of fulfilling the task (Hist. 1.Prol.1–2). Later, in Books 3 (4.6) and 6 (1.12), he returns to Augustine’s role in the work, writing that he must remain within the guidelines to the subject that Augustine had given him. Thus, because Christians and their God were being blamed for the suffering of the Romans, Orosius sets out to refute these polemicists and to analyze the history and cause of human suffering (Hist. Prol. 9–10). The history attempts to investigate all the natural disasters (famines, earthquakes, and diseases) and the wars of the past to consider their causes. In the “Prologue” he tells Augustine that he believed the past was worse than the present, and the further one retreated from the religion of Christ, the greater the human suffering. Here, he lays out the theory of providential history and God’s role in the punishment of humans for their transgressions (Hist. Prol. 14). He adopts the idea that God is guiding history, and God will punish immoral action in the temporal domain, in radical contrast to Augustine and later to Dante’s idea that “perfect justice” could only be achieved in the heavenly city. Orosius’ work was the most widely circulated authoritative source of information on geography and on ancient history that argued for divine providence in human events available in the Middle Ages. More than any other work, it was the encyclopedia to which one turned for the history of the ancient empires and for the geography of the world.30 Nearly 200 manuscripts of the work are still extant, and a bull written by Pope Gelasius (494 CE) had given full ecclesial support for it, thus testifying to Orosius’ authority as a historian of the ancient empires.31 From the fifth through the sixteenth centuries, ample evidence exists for a broad reception of Orosius’ work, for his work appears in Cassiodorus, Gregory of Tours, Venerable Bede, Paulus Diaconus, and Honorius of Autun, among others, besides of course, Dante and Petrarch.32 Orosius’ History was translated into Anglo-Saxon under the order of Alfred the Great,33 translated into Arabic in the tenth century in Cordova, and into Italian by the Florentine Bono Giamboni (1235–1292?) in the thirteenth century. Giamboni’s work is particularly of interest, not just because the translator is a Florentine and a contemporary of Dante’s but also because it demonstrates thirteenth-century Florentine humanism and translation of ancient Latin texts into the Tuscan dialect. It made Orosius’ history widely available to a highly literate Florentine reading public, at a time of intense political and civic fractiousness. Ibn Khaldûn (1332–1406) used Orosius as his source for ancient history, which is especially

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interesting since he has so little to say about Roman history, and he certainly rejects the divine providence of earthly kingdoms, at least as formulated by Orosius.34 There is another Italian version published in 1520, testifying to the ongoing importance of Orosius as a historian of the ancient world as well as to the resiliency of the providential theory.35As a model for Christian universal history in the Latin West,36 Orosius’ grand narrative dwarfs Livy’s attempt at serializing the history of Rome. The ideological presuppositions are unprecedented. All human history is placed on a single timeline and the providential action of the Christian God becomes the means for understanding the unfolding of history. The late Middle Ages continued to produce universal histories in the Orosian mode; for example, Vincent of Beauvais’ thirteenth-century Speculum Historiale and the chronicles of the kings of France produced at Saint-Denis also share the ideological convictions that Orosius promoted,37 and appear at the same time that the French are developing a theory of divine rule on earth in the person of the king.38 In fourteenth-century England, Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon and Nicholas Trevet’s Historia ab orbe condito and his Anglo-Norman chronicles all show the influence of Orosius’ historical theory. Dante’s Monarchia, Epistola 5, 6, and 7, and the Commedia39 reflect both Orosius’ ideological foundation and follow his historical narrative.40 These medieval translations, adaptations, and reapplications of Orosius testify both to the continuing interest in his work and to the resiliency of the providential historical theory. This strand of Christian thinking appears almost as a norm of Christian historical theory at least until the fourteenth century, when as Beryl Smalley put it, something snapped.41 Orosius accepts, even exults in the sufferings that he deems the story of human history, a precondition to a historical theory that sees the present as overcoming the miscreant deeds of the past. All human suffering is wrought by sin, the reason and cause for the nightmare that is human history. This is the ideological and moral underpinning of this version of the history of the world, with Rome the city and now Christian Empire both the result of God’s providential guidance. Orosius’ historical theory has four features: a universal map that makes all the regions of the world part of the same geographical system rather than separate zones as earlier represented by his contemporary Macrobius; history that unfolds in terms of the founding of the city of Rome (“ab urbe conditam”), echoing Livy’s Ab urbe condita,42 thus making Rome the center of the world and of human history; a chronological order that understands the birth of Christ as well as the birth of the Roman Empire as the beginning and the realization of a new temporal and spiritual order; and finally, an historical argument that all

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human suffering is caused by human sinfulness, as found in the Hebrew Bible (especially the Deuteronomic histories) informs his narrative. This view encloses God in a temporal order in which the divinity acts in a determinative fashion, one of the strands that portray divine action in the Pentateuch and the history books of the Hebrew Scriptures. Following the pattern of divine intervention on behalf of the chosen people (e.g. in Genesis, Exodus, Kings), Orosius adopts the Yahwist divinity as the primary actor in history.43

Orosius’ universal geography Ruled by an epistemology that sees history (time) and geography (space) as a oneworld system, Orosius awards a privileged position to geography as the foundation for his universal system. Orosius’ history begins (as many medieval encyclopedia, following his lead, also would later) with a description of the geographical spaces of the world—the division of the world into three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe. His use of a geographical prologue, it has recently been noted, established a tradition that indeed continues into modern history writing.44 Orosius’ geography makes the territory of the world a single entity, a feature that is central to his universalizing purposes, for he demonstrates the breadth of Christian reach in a cosmos created by God.45 Creator of the geography of the Christian West, more than any other learned figure of the patristic Latin Church, Orosius establishes the cultural-geographical and political space of the Roman Empire as Christian space whose center was Rome, referred to by Orosius as “the City.” This tripartite single land mass Earth theory took on a quasi-orthodox authority as it upheld the Christian interpretation of Genesis, in which God created the entire world and the first couple with human salvation as the goal. In bringing the world into a single geographical system, Orosius ties geography to faith and theology. This spatial orientation matches the historical theory because both are systems that arrange all events in all places to fit a single all-encompassing view. Departing from the pattern of the geographers of the ancient world (Pliny, Ptolemy, Strabo, and Mela) who begin with the West and end in the East,46 Orosius orients his map to the “East,” a convention of Christian map-making that would be followed throughout the western medieval period.47 Possibly Orosius’ decision reflects his religious bias because Christian tradition placed Paradise in the East,48 but Orosius does not follow this convention, because, avoiding mythological foundations, he chooses instead not to give a

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geographical place to Eden. By making the beginning of civilization in the East (with Ninus, first universal king), and showing its movement from East to West, he follows the Roman convention of translatio imperii, in which the imperial political structure moved from East to West as celebrated in Virgil’s Aeneid. A second feature of Orosius’ universalizing geography is that he makes the four points of the world parallel the four great realms: thus, Babylonian in the East, Carthaginian in the South, Macedonian in the North, and Roman in the West (2.1.6). In Orosius’ map, Asia takes up half the world in the East, and Europe and Africa take up equal parts of the remainder. Orosius gives the eastern boundary of the world as the Ganges River (Hist. 1.2.13), the western boundary as the Straits of Cadiz (Hist. 1.2.10–11), the geographical limits of the known world. This geography contrasts with the other competing world map—Macrobius’ zonal theory—which divided the world into five zones, frigid, temperate, and torrid—with parallel frigid and temperate zones in the northern and southern hemispheres that were divided by the torrid zone. The zonal maps that support this theory are oriented North as opposed to East as in Orosius.49 Passing over whether the Earth is a sphere in silence, Orosius follows official Roman cartography as argued by Agrippa, one of his primary sources, to adhere to the theory that the Earth’s single land mass was surrounded by water. Orosius does not mention any maps in his text, but his division of the earth’s regions served as support for T-O mappaemundi.50 A T-O (orbis terrarum) map is a circle (O) divided by a T or in some cases a Y. Oriented East, following Orosius’ layout of his orbis terrarum, the top half of the map is Asia, with Europe on the left and Africa on the right of the bottom half. This tripartite version of the world divided into Asia and Europe and Africa has sources in Lucan’s Pharsalia and also in Sallust’s War with Jugurtha.51 Orosius ignores the five climactic zone theory because it would undermine his geographical universalism. The Pythagorean theory or Crates’ theory that Macrobius followed had led to hypothesizing that beyond the torrid equatorial zone lay the Antipodes: another place, continent, or land mass that those in the northern hemisphere had not encountered and where monstrous people, not descended from Adam and Eve, might live. Orosius’ geography ignores stories about monstrous races, antipodes, fourth continents,52 or the wonders of the East including the eastern geographical location of Eden, although he mentions the alleged monsters of the Nile. Nonetheless, following Virgil, Horace, Strabo, and Macrobius, he separates the history of peoples into the civilized and the uncivilized.53 Unlike Macrobius, for whom the hunters and gatherers represent a

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kind of recursive golden age,54 Orosius characterizes those who lived before the advent of agriculture and cities as barbarian, even if “unwarlike” and “inoffensive,” like the Scythians (Hist. 1.4). Although he does not adhere to the wonders of India rumors, promoted by Pliny,55 like Augustine, he defers to the ancient topos of a peaceful India (Hist. 1.9.4). In summary, largely faithful to ancient Roman sources, Orosius provided the T-O map cosmography, the primacy of the East, the centrality of the city of Rome, the term “our sea” (mare nostrum) for the Mediterranean, and an unexaggerated description of the East in contrast to Pliny. Orosius’ universal geography, or one-world system and universal time system are central to his providential theory. If the divinity operates providentially on behalf of humankind, all humans would of necessity have to be located in the same time and space system.

Orosius’ universal history Thus, the first dimension of Orosius’ universalizing system is to bring all geographical space into a single unit (in contrast to various geographical zones). The second means by which he remakes the myth of Rome is to use the founding of the city of Rome as the measure of time, for all history unfolds in relationship to before and after the city’s beginnings: “Ante annos urbis conditae MCCC” (“One thousand three hundred years before the founding of the City” [Hist. 1.4.1]) or “ . . . one thousand one hundred and sixty years before the founding of the City” (Hist. 1.5.1); “ . . . in the eight hundred and fifth year before the founding of the City” (Hist. 1.10.1) or “In the eight hundred and eighth year after the founding of the City” (Hist. 7.7.1). This expression appears hundreds of times in the history and clearly emanates from Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, although Orosius may only have known Livy through compendia.56 The foundation of Rome, for Orosius being an epochal event, provides the time scheme to bring various histories into the same overarching system and thus to show that history follows the divine plan. He organizes history around the founding of Rome and uses the convenient coincidence that Jesus, according to Luke (2.1), was born when Augustus Caesar was emperor and when the Roman Empire began (Hist. 6.22.9) to make the Incarnation the centerpiece of his historical theory. Luke’s use of the census (Hist. 7.3.1–4) and the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate’s and Herod’s roles in the passion narratives provide the prompts to tie the history of the gospels to that of the Romans. In this version

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of world history, Orosius creates an organizing temporal scheme to bring all human history into the same system, dated from the foundation of the city and the beginning of the Roman Empire when Christ was born. Like Livy, except with a far grander reach, Orosius sets Rome as both the center of time and space–of history and geography. Strabo also put Rome at the center of the world’s geography in his Geography (19 CE), while showing the demise of all previous Empires with Rome’s triumph and providing a firstcentury map of the inhabited world. The foundation and spur to Orosius’ historical theory, this spatial and temporal universal scheme, makes all prior history contrast with the Roman. In fact, Virgil once more becomes pivotal, for although Orosius ignores the tradition begun by Lactantius of Virgil as prophet of Christianity, he nonetheless uses Virgil’s Aeneid to support his retelling of Roman history. Although there is no reference to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue and no reference to Virgil’s prophetic role,57 Orosius, nonetheless cites Virgil to prop up his theory that the world is improving and that it is impossible for humans to judge the times in which they live in relationship to others because of their narrow vision. Specifically, he opens Book 4, which he devotes to Roman history, with a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid that features the nadir of Rome’s antecedent fortunes, the forced exile from Troy. When Aeneas, having left Troy and suffered the terrible storms, tries to console his companions, Orosius remembers that Aeneas told his fellow exiles, “Sometime you may recall today with pleasure” (“Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit” [Aen. 1.203; Hist. 4.Pref.1]). This remark of Aeneas becomes the occasion for Orosius to launch a long discourse on how humans understand the historical events that overtake them. Just as Aeneas recognizes that the worst of sufferings might be understood differently in another time, multiple perspectives affect human interpretation of experiences, Orosius claims. An eternal optimist, he can insist that the past is more pleasant to recount or to understand than it was to live; the future is rendered better because of the displeasure of the present; events which occur to humans during their lives, no matter how insignificant, have a more profound effect upon humans than either the events of the past or those imagined in the future.58 Orosius’ providential history accepts without question the idea of progress while hope is the theological virtue that informs this view, and perhaps this alone explains Orosius’ wide popularity in the forthcoming millennium.59 Adopting the idea of history as education to explain human political failure, at the beginning of Book 2, Orosius lays out his just punishment of God economy. God created mankind and when mankind sins, the world will receive

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the discipline of God. His historical theory suggests that the divine discipline actually occurs in this world. As the creatures of God, we are also the objects of divine attention: “So, if we are the creation of God, we are properly also the object of his attention . . . ” (Hist. 2.1.2),60 writes Orosius, arguing that God’s interest in history means the world is improving, for all the empires prior to the Roman deteriorated because their rulers were morally debauched. Thus, in keeping with the Virgilian and Livian traditions, Orosius argues that all the earlier empires (Babylonian, Macedonian, and Carthaginian) represent failed histories. Those who rule and govern their actions with the knowledge of God’s role in history thrive and those who do not fail. Thus, he writes, since power emanates from God, the four realms, Babylonian, Macedonian, Carthaginian, and Roman receive and might lose power from God (Hist. 2.1). Although Rome and Babylon had similar beginnings, advantages and failures, Babylon had lost its power while Rome still held it. Babylon had fallen when the Medes conquered it, but Rome, though vehemently attacked by the Alaric-led Goths, because its emperor was Christian, still stood (Hist. 2.3.3–4). Babylon was dissolute in contrast to Rome, whose emperor observed restraint and continence (Hist. 2.3.7).Why did Rome prevail? Because Babylon was decadent and had no reverence for religion; whereas “in Rome, there were Christians who showed mercy, and Christians to whom mercy was shown” (Hist. 2.3.6–7).61 After summarizing the events of Gen. 1–9 (Creation, Human Sin, and Flood), to establish his theory of divine rage and vengeance for human transgression (1.3), Orosius begins with the Assyrian (Babylonian) Empire, with Ninus and his wife, Semiramis. In contrast to Ctesias (c.398 BCE), who shows Semiramis as brilliant and beautiful, although ambitious, power hungry, and a subjugator of her husband,62 Orosius embellishes Semiramis’ history of luxury and conquest to emphasize her political and territorial ambitions: The woman, not content with the boundaries which she had inherited from her husband [Ninus], . . . added Ethiopia to her Empire by war, and drenched it with blood. She also waged war on the peoples of India, where no one except herself and Alexander the Great had ever entered . . . . (Hist. 1.4.5)63

Furthermore, he dwells on her sexual pathologies and the legal ramifications of her behavior: This woman, burning with lust and thirsting for blood, in the midst of unceasing adulteries and homicides, after she had slaughtered all whom summoned by royal command she had delighted by holding in her adulterous embrace, finally,

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after shamelessly conceiving a son and impiously abandoning him, and after later having incestuous relations with him, covered up her private disgrace by a public crime. For she decreed that between parents and children no reverence for nature in the conjugal act was to be observed and that each should be free to do as he pleased. (Hist. 1.4.7–8)64

Orosius has good reasons for beginning with this ignominious story. In exaggerating the decadence of the first imperial civilization, which expanded, succeeded, and failed, he can establish the foundation for his historical theory. Before the Romans and the Incarnation, history was much worse. The Babylonian queen of the first realm possessed a voracious appetite for land, power, and warfare, and an insatiable libido accompanied this territorial ambition that led her to violate basic laws of nature and to change laws to satisfy her depravity. This Babylonian story would be repeated in western histories, finding one of its most powerful renditions in Dante’s Inferno where Semiramis finds herself the first of the sexually depraved queens in the circle of the lustful (Inferno 5.52–60). Like his history of the Babylonians, Orosius’ story of Macedonia stresses the undisciplined desires of its rulers and particularly those of Alexander the Great who was “insatiable for human blood” (“humani sanguinis inexsaturabilis” [Hist. 3.18.10]). Following Roman Stoic traditions,65 Orosius shows Alexander’s effort to conquer India as a gratuitous search for conquest at the cost of an enormous number of lives (Hist. 3.19.1–3). Furthermore, as if in a divinely patterned retribution, after Alexander’s Indian adventure, he died in Babylon, for “still thirsting for blood” (“cum adhuc sanguinem sitiens”), he was poisoned by a treacherous servant (Hist. 3.20.4). In describing the supplications and sufferings of the Indians at the hands of Alexander and his troops, Orosius seeks to find parallels between Alexander’s mad rampage across Asia and the present Goth invasions into the Roman world. Speaking out in the first person, he complains about the pitilessness of men who make the whole world tremble in fear (Hist. 3.20.5) to launch an argument that contrasts the present situation in face of the Goth attacks and Alexander’s reign of terror, the former seeking to destroy while the latter sought conquest. Although he fears that the Goths might succeed in conquering Rome and organize it according to their own style, nonetheless, with his perpetual optimism, he is certain that one day they will be seen as great kings (Hist. 3.20.12). In other words, Rome will not decline. Indeed, Orosius insists that the contemporary situation is minor in contrast to the damage inflicted by Alexander, who bathed the world in blood. In reflecting on Alexander’s history and on the interpretation of the historical events, he

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laments how pitiless humans are, arguing that in every time misfortune returns cyclically to inflict suffering on its victims. He contrasts the merit of Alexander’s achievements, as valorous deeds or as gross calamities, depending on one’s perspective, against the misfortune inflicted by the Goths, repeating that the latter is minor: By whatever name such deeds as these are called, that is, whether they are spoken of as sufferings or acts of bravery, when compared with those of former times both are fewer in this age, and so in comparison with the times of Alexander and the Persians work to our advantage. If “bravery” is the word to be used now, it is less on the part of the enemy; if suffering, it is less on the part of the Romans. (Hist. 3.20.13)66

This contrast also undermines the history of victors, a central point against those Romans who blamed the Christians for Rome’s vulnerability. Defending his conviction that Macedonian military failure resulted from moral failure, he argues that the Roman sufferings of the moment cannot be compared because their moral comportment is superior. Having recounted all the immense sufferings that preceded the Punic Wars, Orosius turns to the Carthaginian effort to conquer Rome, arguing, in Livian tradition that it was not Roman bravery that turned Hannibal away but divine protection (Hist. 4.17.8), thus eliding the differences between the Roman gods and the Hebrew or Christian God. In arguing for God’s redemptive interest in human history, however, he must show that all historical suffering has been occasioned by human sins. But, in telling this story, he is compelled to disparage the earlier empires as violent and cruel powers, characteristics leading to the downfall of both their leaders and the empires themselves. Rome likewise must look to its own history of violence to understand its present suffering. Developing the story of Rome in tandem with other histories, Orosius does not ignore Rome’s failures. Indeed, earlier moral intransigence can support his argument that the world has improved under Roman rule. The founding of Rome by Romulus becomes a historic marker coinciding with the reconstruction of Babylon by Semiramis (Hist. 2.2.5), but Orosius remembers Romulus as the murderer of his progenitor Numitore and of his brother Remus and as the rapist of the Sabine women. Staying silent on the mythological foundation of the city, indeed implying that Romulus was illegitimate, Orosius writes, “. . . after the overthrow of Troy . . . the city of Rome was founded in Italy by Romulus and Remus, twin originators” (Hist. 2.4.1).67 Of Romulus, he records, “The kingdom

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of his grandfather, the walls of his brother, and the temple of his father-in-law, he dedicated with blood; and he gathered together a band of criminals promising them impunity” (Hist. 2.4.3).68 He does not conclude Romulus’ infamous career with this summary, but provides a detailed story of violence including civil war, treachery, usurpation, and rape (Hist.2.4.4–8). In fact, as the defender of Rome, Orosius’ description of Rome’s violent beginnings, although without the deference to Mars, ironically sounds very similar to Michel Serres’ contemporary version of Rome’s origins.69 Orosius concludes his story of the foundation of the City with the modest claim that “I shall touch very briefly upon the never-ending struggles, and yet always serious according to the size of the forces involved” (Hist. 2.4.8).70 Since the doors of the temple of Janus have always been open after the death of Numa, except for one brief year after the Punic War (Hist. 3.8.2; 4.12.4), Orosius writes, we cannot compare our times with those before the Empire when war and war-making reigned supreme. Further, in defending the Christian divinity whose failure to protect Rome from the attacks of the Goths had been held responsible for Rome’s weakness, Orosius recalls that Romulus’ divinities failed to rescue him from all his sufferings: “If the Romans by worshiping the gods merited the favor of the gods, and by not worshiping them lost it, who by worshiping the gods merited that Romulus himself, the parent of Rome, was safe in the midst of so many evils that attacked him from his very birth? Was it his grandfather, Amulius, who exposed him to death? Or his father, who was unknown? Or his mother Rhea, convicted of defilement?” (Hist. 6.1.13–14).71 Of course, for Orosius, the question is polemical. In contrast to the Christian God, the Roman gods did not reward and punish. It is the God of the Christians who has liberated the Romans from their history of violence. In contrast to Cicero and Macrobius (as well as the Roman writers Lucan, Sallust, and Juvenal), and more significantly, Augustine, whose sympathies ultimately align with the Roman Republic, for Orosius, the Roman Empire was an historical advance for all mankind. He clearly favors Julius Caesar, recounting the ineluctable march of Julius as he eliminated the last powers of the Republic, Pompey and his family, Juba, Scipio, Cato, and others (6.15–16). For Orosius, in contrast to Augustine, the Republic was an unstable period in Roman history.72 The world achieved peace when by the action of God himself, he argues, Augustus Caesar ended civil wars and closed the doors of the Temple of Janus for the third and last time, making way for the birth of Christ to signal the end and beginning of historic epochs (Hist. 3.8; 6.17).

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Even though Orosius fully describes all the miscreant acts of Caligula, Nero, and other decadent emperors of the first century of the Empire, based on Suetonius and Tacitus, for example, Book 7 sets out to prove that the Empire was a historic improvement. To defend the history, he adopts a narrative of cause and effect, akin to the biblical narratives that attribute Judah’s and Israel’s suffering to moral depravity and a return to idolatry (e.g. as in Kings 1 and 2, or Isaiah). He attempts to show that every suffering of the Romans followed a Roman moral transgression. For example, Caius’ impiety to the temple resulted in famine at Rome (Hist. 7.3.5–6). Citing the slaughter of the innocents, he recounts that when Herod, the King of Judea learned that Jesus was born, he ordained that a great number of small children should be killed in order to pursue the one. To explain and apologize for this heinous act, he attributes the mass murder to the just punishment for the wicked, who adopt evil ways (Hist. 7.3.1–3). The civil wars that followed Nero’s reign resulted because of Nero’s persecutions of the Christians, and such persecutions were stopped because of Christian prayers (Hist. 7.8.2–5). Jerusalem, as the city where Jesus died, possesses political and religious significance, according to Orosius. Jerusalem has none of the symbolic values we see, for example, in Hebrew biblical texts, where as the city of David, it is often called the city of God (Psalm 47 (46) and Psalm 86 (87), for he claims that this is where the Romans inflicted a just vendetta against the Jews (Hist. 7.9.5–9). In the New Testament, a typological relationship linked the earthly city with the heavenly city, as Paul writes in the Letter to the Galatians, speaking of the mothers of Abraham’s two sons: “This is an allegory: the two women stand for two covenants. The one covenant comes from Mount Sinai; that is Hagar, and her children are born into slavery. Sinai is a mountain in Arabia and represents the Jerusalem of today, for she and her children are in slavery. But the heavenly Jerusalem is the free woman; she is our mother” (Gal. 4.24–6). For Paul, Jerusalem is both a historical and an eschatological city, whose true meaning is in the as yet unrealized future.73 For Josephus, on the other hand, watching the demise of the city, the temple, and the veneer of Jewish political autonomy in the late 60s, Jerusalem is the historic city that has been captured on five previous occasions and is now for the second time devastated. Demurring to a kind of stoic resignation about the forces of history, he claims it was once a Canaanite city until David expelled the Canaanite population. But the Babylonian razing of the city ended the Davidic dynasty. On Titus’ conquest, he concludes, in a mood of regret and nostalgia, “Howbeit, neither its antiquity, nor its ample wealth, nor its people spread over the whole habitable world, nor yet the great glory of its religious rites, could aught avail to

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avert its ruin. Thus ended the siege of Jerusalem” (Jewish Wars 6.442). Josephus brings his history to the end of Jewish temporal power, and this conclusion becomes historically symbolic, for watching its destruction, he sees God now taking the side of the Romans. As discussed in the last chapter, Josephus follows the Deuteronomic historic theory, conjecturing that humans bring destruction on themselves. Josephus further explains that the Jews mistaking oracles about a coming redeemer who would become monarch of the whole world as one of their own, in fact contributed to their destruction, for it was the Emperor Vespasian who was declared universal emperor while in Judaea (Hist. 6.4.314). Orosius recounts this same history, emphasizing that Jerusalem is the historical place to which the Jews returned after the Babylonian exile (Hist. 7.2.3), that Jerusalem is where Vespasian was declared emperor of Rome during the campaign to capture Judea, and that it is the city that Titus destroyed when he razed the temple to the ground, as the prophets had predicted (Hist. 7.3.8; Hist. 7.9.3–6). For Orosius, the destruction of Jerusalem and the horrendous suffering of its residents when Titus vanquished the city was just vengeance for the passion (Hist. 7.9.6–9). Why? Because at the moment, he imagines, when the Church of God was growing abundantly throughout the whole world, the Temple, drained of its power, and empty, and unable to serve anything good, had to disappear by the power of a divine decision. Thus, Titus, the proclaimed emperor by the army, set fire and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem . . . Cornelius and Suetonius report that “six hundred thousand Jews were killed in this war,” which Orosius justifies as divine rage (Hist. 7.9.5–7),74 thus introducing a theory of divine vendetta that Dante will repeat in Paradiso 6 and 7. At the beginning of Book 6, Orosius gives the most succinct summary of his historical theory. He explains that under the true God’s rule, realms are changed. God arranges the times and punishes sins, chooses the weakest of the world and confounds the powerful, and He founded Rome. This empire, first ruled by kings and consuls, brought Africa, Asia, and Europe under a single ruler, and God put this power in the hands of a single emperor. Finally, under this just Roman rule, God sent his son to be born (Hist. 6.1.5–7). Throughout the history, however, Orosius, as Augustine also will argue, seeks to prove that all human suffering—wars, famines, and natural disasters—result from human intransigence. He returns to this theme in Book 7, affirming for the last time his basic presupposition: Sufficient proofs, in my opinion, have been gathered, by which, without any of the secrets which belong to the few faithful, it can be proven completely that the one and true God, whom Christian religion preaches, made the world

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Orosius imposes this pattern of explanation on the entire history of the Empire covered in Book 7. Like Eusebius and Lactantius, he looks to Constantine as the great liberator of Christians from persecution. In a vigorous defense of Christianity against its attackers, he recalls the evidence of the destruction of churches and the torture and death of Christians, brought to an end by Constantine’s edict. And then, as an effect, he writes, there was no more famine, pestilence, and no forced warfare. Furthermore, besides this, something that until then had never existed, all kings were in a grand union of agreement and forces (Hist. 7.26.1–6). Orosius’ apology sets out to show the past as more wretched than the present, a defense he directs against those who were attacking Christianity as the cause of Roman weakness. Considering the atrocities of the past, when the Greeks, according to Homer, waged war for 10 years in Troy, and then the cruelty of the destruction, the massacre and imprisonment of its people, and their exile, all this in comparison to the present suffering for Orosius was far worse (Hist. 1.17.1–3). Orosius attempts to bring together all the diverse fragments of history and to arrange them in what to him becomes a sensible form. He ignores Roman mythical narratives: he does not refer to the divine origins of Romulus and Remus, to the divine origins of Aeneas, to the Sibylline prophecy of the birth of Christ, or to the strange event at the Milvian Bridge that led to the legalization of Christianity within the Empire. But, by placing the Incarnation at the center of history simultaneously with the beginning of the Empire, he embraces the Roman Empire, replacing the Roman pagan divine interventions with the Christian God’s birth. This rhetoric of historical desire—making the world and human actions in it actually make sense—provides a historical purpose and moral explanation for suffering, thus imposing a Christian teleology on the world’s history from its beginning to its end that will inevitably come, and all of which, in Orosius’ case, is divinely ordained. Attempting to make the order of history rational and hopeful, he insists that the world is improving under the wise guidance of the Christian religion, writing in the final words of the work addressed to Augustine:

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I have set forth, with Christ’s help, according to your bidding, most blessed father Augustine, the desires and the punishments of sinful men, the struggles of the world and the judgments of God, from the beginning of the world down to the present day, that is, during five thousand six hundred and eighteen years, as briefly and as simply as I could, but separating Christian times, because of the greater presence of Christ’s grace, from the former confusion of unbelief. (Hist. 7.43.19)76

But Orosius, nonetheless, tempers this optimistic historiography with a combination of the universalizing tendencies of neo-platonic, Stoic, and Christian worldviews. In the biblical tradition of the “homeless” or alien status of the Christian, he writes of his flight that had brought him to Hippo, “But for me, when I flee at the first disturbance of whatever commotion, since it is a question of a secure place of refuge, everywhere there is native land, everywhere my law and my religion” (Hist. 5.2.1). Here he sounds distinctly Augustinian, as we will see in the next chapter. But, he also exhibits affection for Roman republican traditions, the Christian moral ethos, the stoic respect for the order of nature, and the neo-platonic scorn for worldly values: “Among Romans, as I have said, I am a Roman; among Christians, a Christian; among men, a man” (“Inter Romanos, ut dixi, Romanus, inter Christianos Christianus, inter homines homo” [Hist. 5.2.6]). As a Roman, he writes, “I implore the state through its laws” (“legibus inploro rempublicam” [Hist. 5.2.6]); as a Christian, “the conscience through religion” (“religione conscientiam” [Hist. 5.2.6]); as a stoic, “nature through its universality” (“communione naturam” [Hist. 5.2.6]). As a Christian neo-platonist, “I enjoy every land temporarily as my fatherland, because what is truly my fatherland and that which I love, is not completely on this earth” (“Utor temporarie omni terra quasi patria, quia quae vera est et illa quam amo patria in terra penitus non est” [Hist. 5.2.6]). Yet, as an Augustinian Christian, he writes, “I have lost nothing, where I have loved nothing, and I have everything when He whom I love is with me, especially because He is the same among all, who makes me known to all and very near to all” (“Nihil perdidi, ubi nihil amavi, totumque habeo, quando quem diligo mecum est, maxime quia et apud omnes idem est, qui me non modo notum omnibus verum et proximum facit” [Hist. 5.2.7]). And quoting Psalms, like Augustine, Orosius recalls that God does not “desert me when I am in need, because the earth is His and its plenitude His, out of which He has ordered that all things be common to all” (“nec egentem deserit, quia ipsius est terra et plenitudo eius, ex qua omnibus omnia iussit esse communia” [Hist. 5.2.7; Psalm 23 [24].1]).

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Orosius’ cultural-political map of the world follows the traditions of the Augustan Roman poets and Livy to define Christian geo-history. It puts Rome, as city, as Empire, and as people in the center of time and space, surrounded by the geographical territory of the Roman Empire (which includes the pacified Carthaginian and Greek Empires). Outside are Asia—that is, Babylon, Ethiopia, and India. Orosius associates the former empires with the traditional gratuitous acts of barbarism and cupidity of Roman prejudice and the Roman with the theme of courageous and peace-loving people who had to endure the voracious appetite for violence for which the Babylonian Empress and the Macedonian conqueror became infamous. Like his pagan forebears and like Lactantius and Eusebius had done in the previous century, he adopts the theme of Roman historical destiny now in its Christianized form. As a work ostensibly addressed to Roman citizens, this space-time paradigm is a rhetorical device to put Rome at the center of human history, whether for Christians or pagans. As such, its pretensions remain ironic, for the work is written at the time when the Empire is about to cease to exist as a civic entity. Nonetheless Orosius’ providential theory of history, a Christian version of how gods manage history, would continue to prevail in its various versions even up to the present time. In his desire to redeem history, Orosius claims that the world is ruled by divine providence, a premise that supposes the universe is good and just (1.1) and that assumes that historical disorder and human suffering result from human sin. In this effort to redeem history through this historiographical perspective, Orosius avoids typologies and allegories, and reads the Bible, particularly Daniel and the histories, as well as his other authorities literally, making history a source of lessons, for, he argues, it provides education about what causes human misery. He gives the world a single history and single geography and uses the Bible and Christianity to demonstrate the providential and inevitable rise of Rome.

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Augustine’s Theology of History

Nunc iam caelestem arripe, pro qua minimum laborabis . . . Deus unus et verus nec metas rerum nec tempora ponit, Imperium sine fine dabit. . . . Now take possession of the Heavenly Country, for which you will have to endure but little hardship . . . the one true God who “Fixes no bounds for you of space or time But will bestow an empire without end.” City of God, Book 2.29 (Aen. 1.278–9) The City of God specifically confronts questions about who one should blame for historical tragedy or historical triumph, what is the relationship between gods and the temporal domain, and for Christians, what constitutes the relationship between sacred and temporal history. These issues emerged as critical during the unstable political and military situation when Rome was sacked. The year 410 proved to be the beginning of this instability, for as Augustine lay dying, he witnessed the Vandals at the gates of Hippo as they besieged the city. He must have been aware that the old pagan world in which he had been born and educated was about to change; his work would become a theological encyclopedia for the future. An energetic and engaged Church leader, burdened with the heavy duties of a bishop, Augustine still dedicated 25 years to the work, struggling to make it true to Christian doctrinal foundations and at the same time unambiguous.1 Nonetheless, perhaps because of his concrete awareness of historical change underway, he presents history and geography from a metaphysical view of time and space,2 because space and time, for Augustine, could not be determined by citizenship or by the geography of the Roman Empire. Just as for Paul, citizenship, geographical location, ethnic identity, or any worldly convention that determined human status did not create community. In Augustine, community was membership in the city of God, for him the Church (City of God 20.9), which itself was a “reading” group that shared the same hermeneutic, ethical practice,

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and teleology that was the ultimate purpose of life.3 He differed in this regard from other thinkers of the ancient world, like Virgil, Livy, and even Cicero, as well as the Christians, Lactantius, Eusebius, and Orosius, for whom civic action, citizenship, and nobility of soul were inevitably aligned.4 Writing of God’s city, the heavenly country, Augustine uses Jove’s promise to Venus in Book 1 of the Aeneid promising a future empire to redefine empire from an eternal perspective: “[Jove] Fixes no bounds for you of space and time/ But will bestow an empire without end” (“nec metas rerum nec tempora ponit, Imperium sine fine dabit” [Aen. 1.278–9]). He uses Virgil’s promise of an empire to the Romans to exhort the Romans to reject both their Empire and their gods for the one true God, who provides a heavenly empire without end. Augustine began to write the City of God after the sack of Rome in the year 410, working on it almost to the end of his life (412–27).5 Christianity, he claims, was blamed for this great catastrophe on the grounds that the Romans had deserted their gods in favor of the Christian God. Calling this explanation for the attack against Roman power blasphemous and wrong, Augustine described his decision to undertake the project in his Retractations, “burning with the zeal of the house of God, I began to write against these great errors and blasphemies in the books of the City of God” (Retr. 2.43).6 Addressing his friend Marcellinus, in the first paragraph of the City of God, playing on the “founding of the city” tradition, he writes, “I have taken upon myself the task of defending [the glorious City of God] against those who prefer their own gods to the Founder of that City” (“debito defendere adversus eos qui conditori eius deos suos praeferunt” [City of God 1.Praef. 6–7]). Although it is misguided to try to elaborate an Augustinian systematic political or historical theory because his positions differ depending on the time and the circumstances he addresses in his various works,7 nonetheless we can see that he rethinks many ideas about history circulating in the ancient period.8 He undertakes to unravel the Virgilian historical legacy and to separate Christianity from the temporal domain in which Lactantius and Eusebius had entangled it. He also follows in Cicero’s footsteps to question Rome’s desire for territorial domination, but unlike his contemporary Macrobius, he remakes the Platonic heritage by infusing it with his Christian theology of hope. His sources for the concept of the two cities, a terrena civitas and a civitas Dei, although showing similarities with neo-platonist, Manichaean, and Tyconian notions, most likely stem from Christian, Jewish, and Jewish-Christian north African traditions.9 Like the majority of patristic writers, Augustine had not abandoned his pagan upbringing and education when he converted. Rather, his conversion became

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an opportunity to reconsider the views he had developed during arduous years of study of pagan literature. His own account of his intellectual development in Confessions discusses his reading and study of Cicero and Varro, of Platonism and neo-platonism, and of Manichaeanism, Stoicism, Aristotle, the Roman poets, and the Bible.10 Therefore, as with his philosophical views on God, language, the soul, the body, or personal identity, his political views follow both Greco-Roman and Jewish, and Christian traditions. But as with his discussions of other topics, his teleological focus and interpretive methods alter the intellectual purposes of his pagan education. In other words, although he is a product of the same body of knowledge, he interprets its meaning according to his own intellectual and religious terms.11 Although Augustine is interested in empirical history, what he calls historicam rationem (City of God 18.10), still he seeks to separate the history of the city of God from the city of man, even though he recognized that they were inextricably intertwined as Henri Marrou argued, more than 40 years ago.12 Nonetheless, as Markus and Marrou recognized, Augustine has a new concept of saeculum, one that gives him an unprecedented and original approach to history and society.13 Augustine’s understanding of history includes an apocalyptic urgency about the soteriological meaning of events, a recognition that world history reveals evidence of repetitive cycles, that it was subject to the passions and desires of “fallen mankind,” requiring humans to avoid contamination from its pulls and pushes, and finally that the advent of the “mediator” had changed how humans might understand their role and place in historical time. The concept of apocalyptic history that we see in Augustine has its roots in the Hebrew prophets, specifically Daniel. It posits that the present political chaos or suffering must be understood in terms of impending ends and how the previous historical events have led to this promised telos. This is not the same as drawing historical lessons because it assumes that history stands on the edge of a chasm that threatens to swallow us and from which mere morality may not offer safety; the civic/political world has reached an end that requires a radical reassessment of human action individually and in history. Although not in the context of discussing Augustine, Walter Benjamin explored this apocalyptic approach in his essay on the “concept of history.”14 Written in the winter of 1939–40, this last essay that this philosopher of material culture wrote before the fateful events on the Spanish border that led to his suicide confronts the question of how history can be understood. Composed at the moment when he was liberated from jail in Germany, and when Hitler’s Germany had initiated its invasions,

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Benjamin’s essay responded without a doubt to a critical time in history and to an apocalyptic moment to think about history. Examining the theory of historical materialism, Benjamin links it to the theory of messianic expectation that turns the past into a mere citation, thus rendering history in the service of winners,15 making it akin to a type of “epochal” historical theory. Benjamin instead advances an apocalyptic theory of history: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the exceptional state in which we live is in reality the rule. We must form a concept of history that corresponds to this.”16 Benjamin argues that because the revolutionary or subjugated elements in society are uniquely able to recognize the apocalyptic moment, not just at the point of crisis in 1940 but throughout history, it is they that must assume an intense commitment to historical action.17 This view closely parallels the Pauline apocalyptic approach to history18 and other biblical expressions of similar views, as in Mark’s little apocalypse (Mark 13) in the mouth of Jesus or the Apocalypse of John. Augustine carefully adjusts this apocalyptic urgency to the “epochal” events of the early fifth century, when he argues about the spiritual meaning of the rise and fall of empires. For Augustine, in place of the pax romana, the destiny and purpose of the Roman Empire, in the City of God, he posits the peace that passes understanding lodged against an often obdurate and cruel city of man.19 Augustine, like others influenced by neo-platonism—Cicero, Plotinus, and Macrobius—for example, would introduce the concept of “eternity” against which this historical time and place could be measured.20 The ultimate “good” could be projected into an eschatological future. Even if signs of that “good” might appear in the human world, the evidence of the “bad” could easily be identified in the here and now, and in this, Augustine and Dante agree. Dante, whose indebtedness to the Apocalypse of John has been well recognized,21 adopts a similar messianic tone. Augustine’s symbolic concept of the two cities undermines the divine destiny of Rome and its ideology, as upheld by its most revered poet, Virgil. Against Empire, he proposes the divine gift, the hope of individual conversion and transcendence that particular histories could not hamper. To advance this notion, he has to dismiss the idea of divinely inspired Roman political ambitions, Rome’s ideology of history, and the geography of the Empire, which he replaces with God’s design for individual human redemption. Instead of the space of the Empire, he proposes a concept of space and time based on his allegorical reading of Scripture and a reinterpretation of history according to these new conceptualizations.

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Bible against Virgil’s Aeneid Augustine’s reconceptualization of history stems not just from what he reads but more importantly from how he reads. His theory of signs as developed in the De Doctrina Christiana, as demonstrated in his biblical interpretations, and as restated in the City of God and other works demonstrates how he interweaves his theory of interpretation with his teleological theology. He ties future salvation to reading and understanding Scripture and applying its meaning to everyday life practices.22 But, although Scripture certainly has a spiritual and allegorical meaning, which directed one to eternal ends, it is nonetheless rooted in history, he insists. For example, he writes that some assert that the whole episode in Paradise was open to a particularly symbolic interpretation. He concurs, indeed, that major narratives like the episode in the Garden, or Abraham’s two wives, or Moses’ striking of a rock to produce water could all be interpreted symbolically. But he insists also that these events were lodged in a historical reality that could not be denied (City of God 13.21). To create or imagine the time and space of the city of God (civitatem Dei), as a pilgrim among the impious (“inter impios peregrinatur” [1. Praef. 2]), Augustine quotes Psalms throughout the work to lyrically evoke the patience with which humans must await the ultimate justice and mercy of God (Psalm 93.15 [94.15]) for “God is our refuge” (Psalm 45:2 [46.1]).23 He takes the title, City of God, from Psalms, “civitatem Dei” (Psalm 86.3 [87.3] and Psalm 45.5–6 [46.4]; Psalm 47.2 [48.1]), thus establishing his topic as humans within the divine order. Choosing the term civitas rather than urbs, which he tends to apply only to cities like Rome, Alexandria, or Athens, one might see the title purposely pitted against the Roman tradition of urbs et orbis (the city and the world), while it also deliberately echoes and mutilates Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita. For Augustine, given his definition of civitas, based on Cicero, as a number of people held together by a common bond (City of God 15.8), the term is a synonym of societas, but as Van Oort argues, Augustine also uses civitas as a synonym for urbs as when he speaks of Cain or Romulus founding a civitas.24 But for Augustine, following Cicero, it is the issue of “common bond” that defines God’s city. Also, like Cicero, who wrote, in contrast to Virgil’s boundless Empire, “our Empire which is, so to speak, but a point on its [the world’s] surface,”25 Augustine introduces the perspective of eternity to measure current events and the “meaning” of civitas in history.26

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In adopting the tradition that made the Sibylline oracle in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue a prophetic text, as had Lactantius (City of God, 10.27), and rejecting the Virgilian epic heritage in its Christianized allegorical form, Augustine splits the Virgilian legacy. For Augustine, Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue prophesies the Christ event, whereas he reads the Aeneid literally, deliberately uncoupling his revered poet from his literary legacy, and instead taking him on as a historian of Rome.27 Pitting Psalms against the Roman poet he had loved in his youth, in examining the history of the world, Augustine opposes the claims of worldly kingdoms and worldly philosophies to God’s kingdom and to His word, the Bible. He opposes the epic sacrifice for one’s country for which one gains glory, the goals that Augustine identifies with Virgil’s poem and the Empire (City of God 5.13) and responsible for Roman arrogance,28 to lyric humility before the ineffable divinity (Psalm 115 [116]; City of God 10.3.) and the true glory of the city of God. The City of God from the beginning directly confronts Virgil’s authority, as Augustine mines the Aeneid to systematically expose the Roman gods who, he argues, even Virgil himself revealed had failed to support the Romans: “See what sort of gods the Romans trusted to protect their city” (“Ecce qualibus diis Urbem Romani servandam se commisisse gaudebant!” [City of God 1.3.1–2; see also 2.23; 2.29; 3.13]), he writes. Again using Virgil’s epic as his source to undermine the achievements of the Romans, and quoting Sallust, he criticizes the Empire as the betrayer of liberty, not its champion: “ ‘When once the city had won liberty,’ he says, ‘the speed and extent of its development passes belief. So great was the passion for glory that took hold of the people’ (Sallust Catiline, 7.3). It was this greed for praise, this passion for glory, that gave rise to those marvelous achievements, which were, no doubt, praiseworthy and glorious in men’s estimation” (City of God 5.12.54–6 referring back to Aen. 8.646–8).29 In treating Virgil’s epic as history, Augustine follows the neo-platonic and Ciceronian division between truth and poetic fictions and thus dismantles the traditions of epic poetry that had mixed myth and history, gods and humans (City of God 4.26.1–12).30 He likewise ignores the symbolic interpretations that had encouraged Christians to read Virgil’s poem as Christian prophecy. Rather, Augustine assigns Virgil the role of the carrier of the Roman imperial ideology, citing the passage where Anchises, from the land of the dead, tells his son Aeneas that the rule of the Romans will be to spare the conquered and to conquer the proud (Aen. 6.853; City of God Praef.1.6.19). Augustine returns to the same theme in Book 5, arguing that the Romans wanted dominion even more than they cherished liberty, considering it a noble achievement. Here he quotes a

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large portion of the same speech of Anchises to Aeneas, “Be these thy arts, my Roman;/To hold the nations under dominion,/Enforcing peace till it becomes a custom;/To spare the subject, and beat down the proud” (“Romane, memento/ [Hae tibi erunt artes] pacique imponere morem,/Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos” [Aen. 6.850–3; City of God 5.12.77–9). But Augustine’s purpose is to expose this idea of destiny as a self-chosen and immense passion for fame and glory, again with Virgil’s words to prove the point: “Love of the fatherland/Will sway him—and unmeasured lust for fame” (“Vincit amor patriae laudumque inmensa cupido” [Aen. 6.820–3; quoted in City of God 3.16.24; 5.18.19]).31 John Rist rightly argues that Augustine recognized how the New Testament idea that God “resists the proud and gives grace to the humble” (as in Luke 6.34–5; City of God 8.17) contradicts Virgil’s “godlike role” for the secular city and Rome’s mission, as epitomized in this quote from the Aeneid.32 Besides opposing humility as a value to the zest for glory, or Psalms against Virgil’s Aeneid, Augustine, rewrites world history to put the birth, death, and resurrection of the mediator, born of a human virgin and God the Father, as the decisive turning point in the human sojourn on earth. In sending His Word, Augustine explains, in an act of divine love, God opened the way to the eternal contemplation (City of God 7.31). Referring to Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (2.7), Augustine argues that the mediator, appearing in the form of a servant, was both the way of life in our world and eternal life in heaven (City of God 9.15). Adopting this Christocentric view of human potential, Augustine rejects the Roman imperial theory of historical destiny as in Virgil and Livy, which had placed the rise of Rome at the end of historic processes. For Augustine, the Christian answer to this unbounded desire for fame that drove the Roman Empire is “true freedom” (vera libertate), what frees men from the tyranny of sin, from death, and from the devil. It is the love that sets men free (City of God 14.28). Indeed love makes it possible for humans to break from the doomed cycles of history. Two kinds of love created the two cities, one by self-love and the desire for glory, and the second by love of God. Recalling Paul’s admonition that only the Lord deserves glory, “If anyone could boast, let him boast of the Lord,” (2 Cor. 10.17), and alluding to Virgil’s own words, Augustine contrasts the earthly city to God’s city, “In [the earthly city], the lust for domination lords it over its princes as over the nations it subjugates; in the other both those put in authority and those subject to them serve one another in love, the rulers by their counsel, the subjects by obedience. The one city loves its own strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to God, ‘I will love you, my Lord, my strength.’ ’’ (City of God 14.28.7–12; Psalm 17.2 [18.1]).33

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Augustine’s geography Because the destiny of Rome included territorial expansionism, and Eusebius and Orosius had made Roman territory Christian lands, rethinking history also required a reconfiguration of geography and geopolitical boundaries. In contrast to Orosius, neither the historic cities of Rome or Jerusalem occupy the center of Augustine’s orbis terrarum. Adhering to Greco-Roman theoretical and empirical science conventions, Augustine’s geography adopts the tripartite land mass theory (which he made two-part) as in Sallust (86–34 BCE) and Orosius. But his geography follows his historical theory—as terrena civitas, there is no centering of Rome or Jerusalem because there is no divine destiny for either city, although Jerusalem has a symbolic meaning tied to its terrestrial history. Jerusalem is called the city of God in Psalm 45.5 (46.4) and again in Psalm 86.1–3 (87.1–3), and for Paul, it becomes the eschatological future city (Gal. 4.24–6). In the Church Fathers, the mystical meaning of Jerusalem becomes the Church, for Augustine, the visio pacis: “In fact, the name of the city itself has a mystical significance, for ‘Jerusalem,’ as I have said already means ‘vision of peace’ ” (“Nam et ipsius civitatis mysticum nomen, id est Hierusalem, quod et ante iam diximus, visio pacis interpretatur” [City of God 19.11.10–12]).34 Rome and Jerusalem as historical places have a past but they may have no future; they are not eternal. They cannot be compared to the City of God, because it is eternal and possesses no particular ties to any urban or civic history. This position leads Augustine to dismiss political and geographical conventions that created inner and outer boundaries, in the traditions of Roman geography and history, and to conclude that God had created all human beings equally human, a view he also shares with Orosius, although with a different emphasis. The measure of history and geography was Christian virtue, not Roman citizenship, Roman civic virtue, or any other citizenship; as a consequence, the Roman and Assyrian Empires were equally dissolute, while the Indians had come close to Christianity because they accepted a single creator God (City of God 8.9.1–14). The world where this virtue could thrive and the God who created and owned it was not linked specifically either to Roman lands or to any other geopolitical space. Based on his symbolic biblical reading habits and his monotheism, Augustine was universalizing Christianity, but in contrast to Orosius, he extricated it from the exigencies of any particular history, geography, or localized politics. Conversion to Christianity as a creed could change one’s being and, of course, require a new individual responsibility and love for others in the temporal domain, but it would not be linked with citizenship.

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Furthermore, Augustine dismisses as unreasonable (nulla ratione) the Macrobean antipode/zonal theory that there are men on the other side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets where he is, for it seems illogical that men might have crossed over the ocean and established themselves on the other side of the world (City of God 16.9). This rejection stems from two fundamental Augustinian convictions: one, it contradicted his literal exegesis of Genesis, based on the idea that God had created the universe and the first man and woman,35 and two, which is connected to the first, it undermined the universalism that Augustine assumed followed from his monotheism. Even if this other part of the Earth existed, it could be filled with water as well as with land. Rejecting the hemispheric-zonal theory as well as the “romancentric” geographic traditions, Augustine took the whole world as one system without a particular center, for the same single creator God ruled the world (City of God 14.28). Still, his two-part world, like Orosius and Sallust, has three portions, half of which is Asia, the Orient and the remainder equally divided between Europe and Africa, the Occident (City of God 16.17; 18.2). As Orosius, he orients his map to the East. As in Paul, ethnic differences or local customs were not important (Rom. 10.12), for what mattered was the double law of love: by loving one’s neighbor, one also showed love of God (1 Cor. 12–13). Books 16–18 arrange world history to fit within a chronology that began in Eden. Augustine, paralleling Orosius, divided what he called the civitatem mundi, that is, those whose aim is worldly advantage, into the two great empires, the eastern and the western, or Babylonian and Roman, the latter beginning as the former waned: [T]wo empires have won a renown far exceeding that of all the rest. First comes the Assyrian Empire; later came that of the Romans. These two powers present a kind of pattern of contrast, both historically and geographically. For Assyria rose to power in earlier times; Rome’s emergence was later. Assyria arose in the East, Rome in the West. And to complete the pattern, the beginning of the one followed hard on the end of the other. All other kingdoms and kings, I would describe as something like appendages of those empires. (City of God 18.2.19–25)36

For Augustine, in stark contrast to Orosius’ providential view, Rome, founded in slow, accumulative warfare, was the daughter of Babylon, a second Babylon (18.22.1–2; 18.2.65–6).37 Rome is just like a western Babylon (City of God 16.17.33–4; 18.27.28–9).38

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Asia, as half of the world, was held subject to Ninus, the second king of Babylon, the name of which means confusio (City of God 16.17.26–7). Only the Indians had been spared his conquering sword, but after Ninus’ death his wife Semiramis had sought to suppress India (City of God 18.2.45–52). The injustice of kingdoms explained why they were subject to rising and falling, Augustine writes, citing for example the eastern empire (City of God 18.2.43–54)39 that included all of Asia and went West as far as Lydia, in area half of the world. Alexander of Macedon also had a brief military success in this region. While the “Babylons,” Assyria and Rome, in contrast to “celestial Jerusalems,” divide the world between them, India remains very much a peripheral zone, briefly conquered by Alexander and subject to the aggression of Semiramis, both agents of rapacious conquests, and condemned by Augustine. In contrast to the allegorical and symbolic approach that he would apply to the “land of promise,” Augustine’s discussions of India and other regions peripheral to the Roman Empire demonstrate a capacity to bracket his metaphoric geography and use an empirical approach to geography and society. Here too, his universalist orientation stemming from his commitment to monotheism produced a skeptical and broad-minded approach, relatively free of fantastic presuppositions. Looking around the world for universal signs of monotheism, Augustine sustains an interest in Indian philosophers, the “gymnosophists,” who philosophize in the nude (City of God 14.17.48–51; 15.20.22–4), whom he lists with the Platonists, Pythagoreans, Atlantic Lybians, Persians, Chaldeans, Scythians, Gauls, and Spaniards as having discovered and taught that there was only one God, the author of all created things. Because of this comparable belief, he insists that these are “like us” (City of God 8.9). Clement of Alexandria (150–c.215 CE) and Porphyry (b. 233–d. 305–6 CE), both of whom show accurate knowledge of Indian religious practice (including abstinence from animal food, the division into learned and nonlearned sects, asceticism, and removal to the solitude of the mountains), provides Augustine with knowledge of Indian philosophy and the practices of its philosophers.40 His interest in these parallel practices does not indicate that he divides “the good Aryan Indian” tradition, that made India “good” from the Middle East as “bad.”41 At least of partial Berber origins (through his mother),42 he must be counted as one of those “eastern non-Aryans” himself (even though such a concept certainly did not exist as understood in modern times). Rather, this attitude is an example of Augustine’s sympathy with foreign practices that were similar to his own. Augustine’s sources on India include Strabo who provided accurate information about the Indian philosophers, “the Brachmanes who devoted

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themselves to asceticism, prayer, and learning, and the Garmanes (sic) who lived in forests eating leaves and wild fruits and wore barks of trees.”43 But Strabo had mixed this accurate information with stories of giants, cannibals, and other oddities, just as Pliny the Elder. Pliny, Augustine’s source for empirical information about the geography and geology of the world, had posited that “monstrous races” inhabited the edges of the earth. Augustine rejected this notion, concluding, after enumerating the various forms in which they were said to exist (City of God 16.8.18–8)44 that “Either the written accounts of certain races are completely unfounded, or if such races do exist, they are not human; or if they are human, they are descended from Adam, and therefore children of God, the creator of all things who composed the beautiful fabric of the universe” (City of God 16.8.80–3).45 About these propositions, Augustine warns, “Let no one who is faithful doubt that such an individual is descended from the one man who was first created.” He reinforces his theoretical presuppositions with his Christian conviction that all humans were equally human before God, whether from the edges of the earth or from within the geographical boundaries of the Empire. For him, because all mankind was descended from Adam (City of God 16.8–9), there could be no significant cultural or ideological significance in the divisions between North and South or East and West as found in the Golden and Silver Age Roman writers and even in Orosius, despite his proclaimed universalism. Indeed, Augustine’s position makes the whole notion of particular citizenships suspicious. Augustine’s conviction about the existence of a vast range of people who believe in only one creator God provides one foundation for his universalism, thus giving him the means to imagine a world without the Roman boundaries and replace them with his intellectual and spiritual vision based on those who believe in a single God. Thus, a shared belief in a single and universal God could unite people from completely different cultural, political, and geographical worlds. Such a theocentric presupposition could constitute a means to redraw boundaries between insiders and outsiders or between Romans and others. This is yet another avenue Augustine adopts for undermining and dismantling the myth of Rome’s destiny and the gods who had guided it. Augustine’s attitude toward Jerusalem and the “land of promise” in the City of God contrasts with that of his contemporary Jerome, who had chosen to live in Palestine when he was working on his biblical translations. Augustine never visited the “holy land,”46 whereas Jerome had argued that seeing the sacred historic sites enriched his understanding of scriptures.47 Augustine instead often turns to allegory to interpret the meaning of these same places. Nonetheless, he

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accepts the historicity of Jerusalem and of the Temple, because he writes, “out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” (Isa. 2.3; City of God 10.32.88–9).48 Indeed, the historical reality of Israel, of the Jews, of the biblical histories, and of Jesus’ own Jewishness are central to his attitude toward Jews and Judaism: Jews and Christians worship the same God; for him, the Incarnation had been prophesied in the Hebrew Scriptures. The history and ongoing presence of Jews bore witness to the veracity of the biblical history and prophecy.49 For Augustine, Jerusalem, like Rome, had historical origins: “ There was a time when Rome was not; there was a time when Jerusalem was not” (City of God, 12.16.58–9).50 In a veiled contrast of his position to those of Livy and Orosius, Augustine emphasizes the historical time of the cities, a “before” and an “after” time for their existence. But this historicity of the cities is precisely the foundation for interrogating their political power and even their historical significance except as emblems. In contrast to the eternal God, or the eternal City of God, these temporal cities have limited histories—a “before” and certainly an “after.” The empirical reality of the cities is the foundation on which Augustine builds his symbolic and moral evaluation of their unique histories. As he writes, “the earthly Jerusalem” prefigures the heavenly city (City of God 15.20.43–7). Jerusalem is a starting place for human salvation, not an end. Rather than choosing to make a pilgrimage to the “land of promise” for salvation, he sees life itself as the “woeful pilgrimage” and the true Jerusalem as eternal, where the true people of Israel will see God (City of God 17.13).51 As for Paul, there are symbolic “children of the flesh” and “children of the promise,” Hagar’s and Sarah’s children, respectively, for these two women are the two covenants. Hagar’s slavery corresponds to the present Jerusalem, the earthly city, whereas Sarah’s free children, the “children of promise,” may enter the heavenly city (City of God 15.2.29–50); David was king of the “earthly Jerusalem,” but he was more importantly a son of “heavenly Jerusalem” (City of God 17.20.1–2).52 As Brian Stock points out, this allegorical interpretation rules Augustine’s theory of history, for in Galatians 4.22–6, “ . . . where Paul speaks of the birth of Abraham’s sons, Ishmael and Isaac—the one by the slave-girl Hagar, the other by his free-born wife, Sarah,” Ishmael, who came through the flesh (Gen. 16.15, 21.1–3) refers to Mount Sinai and the first testament; Isaac, on the other hand, born “through the promise” of God, and, coming from nearby Jerusalem, refers to the city that now exists, which is, so to speak in bondage with its children, the Jews; and it refers to the Jerusalem above, “the mother of us all,” which is free. But Augustine’s reading strategy here is allegory whereby the cities and events are interpreted symbolically.53

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As in Jerome’s Commentary on Ezekiel,54 God’s promise of a “house of Israel” to the Hebrew people, for Augustine, becomes the opportunity to see God: That place, therefore, which is promised as so peaceful and safe a habitation, is eternal and is destined for eternal souls in the free mother Jerusalem, where they will be truly the people of Israel, for the name Israel is in our language “Seeing God” (City of God, 17.13.23–6).55 In essence, for Augustine, Jerusalem, the visio pacis, the “vision of peace” (City of God, 19.11) is his teleology, as also for Jerome who uses the phrase, “vision of God,” where all can come to worship.56 It is not the Jerusalem of Hagar, born into slavery, but the Jerusalem of the free mother that will last forever in heaven (City of God, 20.21). Augustine’s argument about spiritual inheritance is strictly hermeneutical, that is, based in a reading strategy. With quotations from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians and 2 Cor., Augustine makes the “flesh” and the “promise” of Gal. 4: 22–6 (referring to the slave son of Abraham, Ishmael, and the free son, Isaac) refer to two interpretive strategies, one of which makes the texts address literal readers of the son born in slavery and the other which allegorically connects Isaac, the free son, to members of the symbolic city of God, the future individual “spiritual” readers in this world.57 For Augustine, because East and West were equally capable of injustice, he condemned the Romans as strongly as he did the Assyrians and Macedonians— all equally human and equally guilty of rapacity, for their desires were profligate and their actions vainglorious. All nations are equal in their potentiality to be rogues: “What are realms but great rogue bands if justice is left out? What are rogue bands except little realms?” (“Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia? quia et latrocinia quid sunt nisi parva regna?” [City of God 4.4.1–2]). In The City of God, the boundaries of the destined “empire without end,” as defined militarily by the Roman State and imaginatively by Roman writers like Virgil and Livy, or the geographers Strabo and Pliny, no longer hold. Augustine normalized the people who lived in the peripheral areas by dismissing exaggerated or grotesque ideas about them, and his “two cities” as metaphorical concept defines the constraints on political ambitions and the limits of worldly power.58 When it comes to divine space, God’s expansive reach excludes even the concept of margins. All mankind ultimately belongs to a single city, and even though all humans are born Babylonians, all may enter the Heavenly Jerusalem, the City of God.59 The “City of God,” however, is not to be confused with the afterworld. As Peter Brown has pointed out, “the City of God, far from being a book about flight from the world, is a book whose recurrent theme is ‘our business within this common

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mortal life’; it is a book about being otherworldly in the world.”60 Augustine’s two cities, the city of man and the city of God, are metaphoric places, for neither of these can be located spatially in any earthly society. Rome, like Babylon, is a city of confusion. His imaginary Jerusalem, as the holy city, conceptually inspired by the Bible and by the city’s history, is also symbolic.61

Augustine’s history as theology With his primary rhetorical purpose to defend Christianity against accusations that Christians had weakened Rome, Augustine sets out to evaluate the processes of history. As has been pointed out by Augustine scholars, “history” is an anachronistic term when applied to Augustine since his term historia comes closer to historiography than to the modern sense in which the word “history” has been applied. For him, the distinction between fact and fiction is less formidable than for modern readers,62 so although he favors Sallust as his historian of choice and treats Virgil as a historian,63 he freely mixes philosophers, historians, and poets—Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Livy, and other writers of the first century—with the Bible to advance his interpretation of the meaning of historical events from his own unique Christian viewpoint.64 As Markus points out, the “development of Augustine’s thought was steadily away from the classical starting point, towards a biblical notion of the transcendent kingdom where alone men (sic) would find their true home, and of human societies which could never aspire to provide for human fulfillment, societies in which the citizen of the heavenly kingdom could never be more than a peregrinus.”65 Examining Roman temporal history in the first five books of the City of God, with satirical genius, Augustine ridicules the mythological origins of Rome, scorning Romulus’ achievement. Romulus was no god, Augustine reminds his readers, recalling the murder of Remus and the rape of the Sabine women; but, he was a fratricide and a rapist (City of God 2.17).66 As for the achievements of Numa, under whose reign Rome witnessed one of the three occasions when the doors of Janus closed, Augustine wants to prove that this peace was not due to the Roman gods (City of God 3.9). Despite Rome’s confused decadence, Augustine still argues early in the City of God that it was through divine agency that the Roman Empire brought universal peace (City of God 5.12.1–3). But he does not connect this pax romana with Christianity, but instead he enumerates the wars, massacres of humans, and spilling of blood that produced the peace.67

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Augustine turns to pagan sources as critics of Rome to bolster his counter argument to Virgil and Livy, and to show that Roman moral corruption predated the Empire, and indeed that the Romans’ lust for domination, as Sallust shows, was the precursor to both its political triumph and its moral decline.68 Cicero becomes an important Roman authority who had criticized his government but who had emphasized the role of moral behavior in the conduct of the State.69 In fact, outside of the Bible, Augustine quotes from Cicero more than from any other author (approximately 90 references, versus 75 to Virgil, 40 to Livy, and 25 to Sallust). He uses Cicero as an authority on the nature of the gods (City of God 4.26.1–2; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.26.65; De Natura Deorum 2.70; City of God 4.30, passim), on what constitutes a civitas, that is, a State (City of God 19.21.1–33; Cicero, De Re Publica 2.42),70 and on the Roman zest for glory and honor, particularly through war and conquest (City of God 5.13.23–36; Cicero, De Re Publica 5.7.9; Tusculan Disputations 1.2.4). Following Cicero, Augustine accepts that citizenship for Romans, epitomized in the Roman virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice, had been interlinked with Roman civic ethics. Romans had once (during the republican period) been disciplined, and this self-denial had effectively led to building the commonwealth. Although its political and social aims were strictly earthbound, Rome had become a great State, Augustine writes (City of God 5.12) but, following a Ciceronian argument, not force of arms but hard work at home, justice abroad, and moral responsibility had aided Roman political development.71 Like Cicero, Augustine also questioned Roman civic virtue even before the birth of the Empire, laying out the dissipation of the Republic when citizens became slaves of their appetites and the common good collapsed (City of God 2.21).72 In introducing the concept of eternity as a means to measure the achievements of temporal history, Cicero’s skepticism about the Romans and particularly about the Republic becomes a foundation for Augustine’s own skepticism about Roman rule. Because Cicero had argued that a commonwealth is “united in association by a common sense of right and a community of interest” under the umbrella of justice (City of God 19.21, quoting Cicero, De Re Publica 2.42 f.), Augustine concludes that these had not merely declined in the Roman Republic but had already ceased to exist.73 It was from Cicero that Augustine borrowed the analogy of kingdoms to robber bands if justice is lacking, from whence stems the famous quotation that likens Alexander the Great to a pirate (Cicero, De Re Publica 3.14.24; City of God 4.4.1–2). Sallust is another authority Augustine uses to remind his readers of the moral failings, the achievements when men were free from covetousness, and the

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calamities of Roman history. For example, he quotes Sallust on the kings, under whose reigns men were content with what they already had (War with Catiline 2.174; City of God 3.10.11–14), in contrast to when Rome sought a great empire by conquest (War with Catiline 2.2; City of God 3.14.44–54). Following Sallust, Augustine sees the demise of Roman virtue occurring with the destruction of Carthage (Sallust, War with Jugurtha 14.4–10; War with Catiline 10.1; City of God 2.18.1–57). Leading up to the Second Punic War, again, with Sallust as his authority, Augustine recounts a story of enslavement, tyranny, burdensome taxation and exploitative interest rates when tyranny, rioting, civil war and party strife reigned supreme (Sallust, Jugurtha 41.1–10; 42.1–5; City of God 3.17). When Augustine discusses Roman imperial history, following Sallust’s evaluation of the results of the Second Punic War, he reveals that his political sympathies are with the Republic, for he saw the betrayal of the Republic as the precursor to decadence, civil war, and imperial expansion. Perhaps revealing his own North African orientation, in a scathing indictment of Roman malice and vice, he identifies Roman moral decline and political triumph with the destruction of Carthage: . . . The abolition of Carthage certainly removed a fearful threat to the State of Rome; and the extinction of that threat was immediately followed by disasters arising from prosperity. To begin with, harmony was broken and destroyed by savage and bloody insurrections; then followed a succession of disastrous quarrels and all the slaughter of the civil wars, all the torrents of bloodshed, all the greed and monstrous seething cruelty of proscriptions and expropriations, so that the Romans, who in a period of high moral standards stood in fear of their enemies, suffered a harsher fate from their fellow-citizens when those standards collapsed. And the lust for power, which of all human vices was found in its most concentrated form in the Roman people as a whole, first established its victory in a few powerful individuals, and then crushed the rest of an exhausted country beneath the yoke of slavery. (City of God 1.30.20–32)75

Scipio Africanus, he wrote, did not want to crush Carthage. Like Cicero and Macrobius, Augustine favors the Roman republican heroes, recounting the history of Scipio, a fighter for Rome’s liberation, who had eventually crushed Hannibal, the most cruel, and brought the Second Punic War to an end and captured Carthage. Nonetheless, he records how Rome rejected him, so that he ended his days in self-chosen obscurity (City of God 3.21).

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Like the Stoic poet Lucan before him, Augustine presents a “jaundiced view of the pagan gods” and expresses despair over the health of the commonwealth.76 Cataloging one ill after another from the time of the destruction of Carthage, Augustine arrives at Augustus Caesar, of whom he writes: “Augustus wrested from the Romans a liberty which was no longer glorious, even in their own estimation, but productive of strife and tragedy, and by now unmistakably listless and enfeebled; he brought everything under arbitrary rule of a monarch, and by so doing he is regarded as having restored to health and strength a commonwealth prostrated by a kind of chronic sickness” (City of God 3.21.45– 50).77 As for Constantine, Augustine does ascribe his success to the Christian God, on the grounds that he rejected the pagan demons (City of God 5.25.1–6), but nonetheless, he notes that God grants power to both the good and the cruel, to Marius, Gaius Caesar, Augustus, Vespasian, and Titus and also to Nero, Domitian, and Julian the Apostate (City of God, 5.21.19–33). This indiscriminate conferral of power, for Augustine, implies that God’s interest in temporal history is peripheral. Examining a number of theories of history, Augustine dismisses the neoplatonic notion that the world is eternal (City of God 12.11), and Heraclitus’ theory that the world is one of many and subject to cycles of rising and perishing (City of God 12.14). He rejects Platonic and Stoic notions of periodic cyclical history on teleological grounds: “[T]hese cyclical revolutions have no place. The eternal life of the saints refutes them completely” (City of God 12.20.29– 39),78 he concludes after exploring the arguments of Plato and the Stoics (City of God 12.14–20). In her dissertation on Augustine, Hannah Arendt proposed that precisely because the Christian philosopher rejects cycles, he introduced the idea that God can create new things, thus making it possible for humans to break away from the apparent cycles of history.79 One could even argue that Augustine’s theory about human beings’ ability to change coincides with this view of history. Just as one could convert from one way of being to another and change one’s mind or one’s orientation, history too could be wrested from the wretched notion that cycles of history control it. In contrast to the Stoic view that fate established human kingdoms, he proposes the role of divine providence (City of God 5.1.2) in the sense that it provides a gift from God (“donum dei” [City of God 5; Preface]). Thus, Augustine developed a far more complex philosophy of Christian history than any of his Christian predecessors. At the time of Theodosius,

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Augustine had adopted the rhetoric of the tempora Christiana, even though well before 410 AD, he had rejected the idea of a Christian Roman Empire on the Eusebian model.80 But when he began to write the City of God, he neither supported the apocalyptic approach to history, as outlined by Hippolytus,81 or the providential, as found in Eusebius or Orosius.82 Just the contrary, he began to distinguish and divorce God’s purposes from the particularities of secular human history, assigning the pagan cyclical theory of history as developed in Plato’s Timaeus, Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, and even Origen’s De Principiis,83 to the city of man. Still, although he maintains that God is involved in history, “why the one true and just God has assisted the Romans . . . to the attainment of the glory of so great an empire” (City of God 5.19.49–52),84 and he claims that he rejects the Stoic fatalistic position, nonetheless, when he equates Rome with Babylon, he presents human historical process as subject to cyclical patterns (City of God 18.2.). When he refers to the rulers of the world who harass their citizens (City of God 4.4), he implies a cyclical and repetitious pattern of disorderly and rapacious rule. Although early in the City of God (Book 5), he seemed to commit himself to the idea that God is involved in secular history, by the time he was working on Book 12, Augustine had clearly changed his mind, an aspect of his intellectual growth that he featured in the Confessions and elsewhere.85 As George Lavere puts it, “Augustine’s attitude towards the secular state is, therefore, quite clear. Inevitably it is unjust and deals in injustice, since it cannot represent the common good of those whom it governs.”86 Nonetheless, we should never forget that he had endorsed State-supported forced conversions to deal with the Donatist controversy, arguing in a letter to Emeritus, a Donatist bishop, that coercion works as a legitimate means to overcome heresy.87 Also, it would have been impossible for him to believe that Christian Rome would not be superior to pagan Rome, but nonetheless he also knew that adopting Christianity would not necessarily transform Rome.88 For him, history was profane, but this was not a denial of the importance of the temporal order. By the time he wrote Book 19 of the City of God, at least 10 years after he began the work, he had come to see that it was a Christian’s duty to be responsible for the temporal order.89 He hoped that Christian princes would rule justly and humbly and believed that subjects should pay their taxes and obey the laws.90 He recognized that life under a Christian ruler might be less dangerous for Christians, but he also knew that a Christian ruler was not necessarily a moral one. He admired Theodosius, extolling his humility, his just and merciful laws, and his Christian evangelism

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(City of God 5.26). Nevertheless, as Rist writes of Augustine’s notions about the State and its rulers: In Augustine’s rather Hobbesian universe the stronger will impose some kind of rule and some kind of peace, and willy-nilly that “peace” will somewhat restrain the hand of other malefactors. If in the struggle a good man (and a fortiori a good Christian) comes to the top, for example as Emperor, there will not only be the longed-for peace, but, in proportion to the ruler’s personal rectitude, an active concern for the well-being of others and even for their religious growth. Yet, such choicer growths of peace are no automatic product of any political system; the “function” of a political system as such is limited to cowing the vicious into respect for the law, just as Rome herself has battered her rivals into submission.91

Although we must search to find in Augustine any justification for a specific Christian politics, nonetheless, he rejected vehemently the idea of any “divine nature in civil power.”92 Clearly this leads to a separation of Church and State and to the conviction that the State is secular. Augustine’s legacy of political realism, however, did not endure into the millennium that followed him, for the precise relationship between secular and clerical authority caused constant controversy.93 By the fourteenth century, the resultant civic and political chaos from the confusion of powers inspired the political and historical ideas of Dante’s Monarchia and the Commedia. Like the Roman poets, Augustine applauded Roman civic virtue that had contributed to the success of the Republic, but, as we have seen, he also knew that the decadence of the Republic, significantly even before the rise of imperial Rome, caused its downfall (City of God 5.12). But in his inimical and brilliant capacity to locate the central issue, he seized on the limitations of pagan Roman ideas of its own destiny to evaluate the Empire’s history. Because of his notion of eternal values, he could identify the goals of the Empire as strictly earthbound. In doing so, he pitted Christian faith against the Roman State, even in its Christianized form, and intellectually undermined the myth of Rome’s providential history. For Augustine, only the biblical canon was sacred history: “ . . . there is true justice in that City of which the Holy Scripture says, ‘Glorious things are said about you, City of God’ ’’ (“in ea certe civitate est vera iustitia, de qua Scriptura sancta dicit: Gloriosa dicta sunt de te, civitas Dei” [Psalm 86.3 [87.3]; City of God, 2.21.121–3]).94 Despite his deference to Cicero and Sallust, Augustine approaches the subject of history and human actions in history with the kind of commitment typical of

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those writers who recognize an urgency in every moment of history that impels us to action.95 Augustine, as scholars have pointed out, writes the City of God as “revelation,” adopting the tone and purpose of the Apocalypse of John even though he definitely did not adhere to millenarianism. As in the Apocalypse Augustine hopes to interpret “the signs of the times” so as to understand the wisdom of God and the action that is required of humans now.96 Writing over such a long timespan, under changing political and cultural circumstances, Augustine, nevertheless, the most original of all his contemporaries, presents his concept of history as an attempt to understand God’s ineffable plan for humanity and how humans must act in the world.97 As Cochrane wrote in Christianity and Classical Culture some 70 years ago, for Augustine, “history is prophecy; i.e. its true significance lies not in the past, nor in the present, but in the future, the life of the ‘world to come.’ ’’98 For Augustine, God is revealed in human time, but not in any particular secular history. This aspect of Augustine’s thinking is enormously important because it lays the groundwork for the separation of secular from sacred history, and therefore of the state from religion, thus undermining any basis for a providential view of profane history. Constantine’s conversion reinstated the pagan practice of uniting the political state with a State religion. But, Augustine, who was preoccupied with the interior life,99 rejected the Empire and its geographical space in favor of “the cross of history,” as he sought to extricate sacred history from profane history and offer his tentative response to the anxieties of his age created by the crisis and potential collapse of the Empire. In questioning secular structures defined by citizenship or tribal identity, Augustine advances the notion of “conscience” that offers the ontological and intellectual grounds for questioning the goals of the State. In fact, Augustine’s idea of individual conscience provided the philosophical grounding for him to break away from the Roman political model.100 His historical or political theory follows from this idea of conscience combined with his faith in the potential for human transcendence.101 Augustine’s inward orientation pushes him to interpret the experiences of history and society symbolically; for him, the Church offers an alternative to secular human history in which to live this new life. As Brian Stock has argued, Augustine’s distinction between scientia and sapientia helps him to interpret the Bible, particularly Genesis, as events that were once historical. The first couple’s desire for knowledge as an end in itself rather than as a means to higher things ended the human sojourn in Eden. For Augustine, this kind of knowledge was scientia, not sapientia or wisdom, and action not contemplation ruled it.102 Informed by sapientia, a contemplative

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means to attain higher things, his approach to history opposes Orosius’ and as a consequence unravels the political claims of both the Christian and pagan Roman imperium. In contrast to the political-geographical boundaries created by the pagan Roman Empire that Constantine had secured, neither geographical nor political boundaries determine Augustine’s theology of history; rather, contemplation and sapientia that bring a different and challenging perspective to the temporal domain replace the old intellectual, political, and geographical boundaries. In this respect, Augustine represents a severe break with the Roman idea of historical destiny. In an extreme version of their differences, Orosius defends the Empire, whereas Augustine—who quotes Livy and Virgil primarily to reveal their limitations, and who defers to Varro, Cicero, and Sallust as his authorities— breaks the knot of Roman historical destiny and so exposes the ideology of the Roman imperium. Orosius took Daniel’s model of human history and brought his Roman Christian politics into line with it. In contrast, for Augustine, as Markus argues, “On the map of sacred history the time between the Incarnation and Parousia is a blank; a blank of unknown duration, capable of being filled with an infinite variety of happenings, of happenings all equally at home in the pattern of sacred history. None are privileged above others, God’s hand and God’s purposes are equally present and equally hidden in them all.”103 Because the real prospect of the end of time and ultimate judgment becomes the measure by which to assess present actions, Augustine’s history is an eschatological and apocalyptic version of history. Even if the eschaton is not on the immediate horizon, its reality provides the means to measure how one acts in the here and now. As already pointed out, Augustine himself in the City of God adopts the role of prophet.104 When Augustine invokes the Bible’s golden rule, “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” he provides the key to his interpretation of human history. Mercy must take precedence over domination as he pits mercy and humility before the eternal God against human political histories. Confronting what he saw as the apparent vanity of human history and the collapse of Roman civic “myths” and secular values, and even the radical nihilism that began to pervade civic life at the end of the Empire, he rethinks history from a theological point of view, not only sacred, Hebrew and Christian history, but also pagan, and Roman in particular.105 This did not lead him to create two separate histories so much as to interpret secular history from the perspective of sacred history. For Augustine, the difference between sacred and profane history derives from the difference in the meaning of the events narrated but not in the events themselves.106

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What then was the Christian’s temporal role in this “woeful” pilgrimage? The answer to this question is evident everywhere in the City of God. See, for example, the recommendation to bestow alms (City of God 1.13.25–8), the identification of human pride as the cause of damage to the temporal domain (City of God 14.27.34–6; 14.28), the value of the struggle for liberty and conversely the avoidance of dominion and suppression of the desire for praise and glory (City of God 5.12), all these lessons he finds from studying the history of the Romans. In Book 14, he gives its most eloquent expression: it is the service of one another in love, the expression of the love of God among all. It is not the arrogance of kingdoms or of rulers nor the glory that men seek, or the multiple pleasures of the world as ends in themselves. Although he does not offer us a concrete politics, he describes the state of the inner life that should rule one’s action in civic life (City of God 14.28). As Peter Brown writes in Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire, “to be a lover of the poor became a public virtue” in the late antique period, and Augustine, in this sense a typical bishop of the period, spoke ardently, often admonishing his parishioners to attend to the needs of the poor. To care for the poor was to obey the commandments of God.107 In fact, Reinhold Niebuhr argued that Augustine’s introduction of “love” into political discussion in a sense equated love with justice as a way of making the city of man reform. Augustine’s view, he wrote was more “adequate than classical and medieval thought, both in doing justice to the endless varieties of historical occasions and configurations and in drawing on the resources of love rather than law in modifying human behavior.”108 Augustine’s profound distrust of kingdoms has even led recent commentators on Augustine to conclude that it would have been hard for him to consider any wars just: “It may even be—if one gives credence to the most skeptical and pessimistic passages in Augustine—that no actual wars are in fact just; and that, whether or not Augustine was a personal pacifist, he should have been and, to be consistent, should have been a universal pacifist as well.”109 More recently, Augustine’s position on warfare has been summarized as a synthesis of Roman (Ciceronian) and Christian positions and as “a legitimate instrument of national policy which, although inferior to the perfect ideals of Christianity, is one which Christians cannot altogether avoid . . ..”110 As a person who recognized that he was a transitional figure, in an age when the Roman Empire and its civic order were at risk of disintegration, Augustine brandished the Christian conscience against the values of the Empire. Although he had assimilated Roman political ideologies (as expressed by Virgil and Livy),

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already questioned for Augustine by Sallust and Cicero, as the Empire crumbled, he abandons the Roman politics of civic virtue and argues for a “politics” based on the values he identifies with the Christian Church.111 To replace the Christianized destiny of the Empire and its theology of historical achievement, the epochality of the “end of history,” as argued by Lactantius, Eusebius, and Orosius, Augustine emphasizes, in apocalyptic terms, that the earth that God has created, God would bring to an end (Psalm 101.26–9 [102.25–8]; City of God 20.24.2–7). Quoting Psalms as his refrain, against the cruelty and suffering of human history (Psalm 76 [77]; City of God 21.18.22–3), and consistently understanding “God’s chosen nation” in universal terms as God’s people, he cites the consolation of God and hope in the aid offered by God (Psalm 30.20 [31.21]; City of God 21.18.55–6; or Psalm 15.5 [16.5], City of God 10.5.1–9; Psalm 61.12 [62.12]; City of God 5.9.83–9), rather than in human institutions or geopolitical structures (Psalm 93.14–15 [94:14–15]; City of God, Praef. 1.1–5). Although his learning and knowledge of history were in continuity with his pagan upbringing and education, his theology of history as developed in the City of God broke with this tradition. Rather, it follows the Johannine view that neither God nor Christian worship are limited to particular places, times, or political units. Augustine stays strictly within the confines of the biblical statement about where God could be found: “[T]he time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem . . . ” (John 4.21). “But the time is coming, indeed is already here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. These are the worshippers the Father wants. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4.23–4; Matt. 28.19; City of God 13.24.96–7). John, writing after the diaspora and the destruction of the Temple, seeks to disassociate Jesus from the temporal and spatial expectation linked with Jewish messianic hopes in Israel. As discussed in Chapter 1, John makes Jesus’ speech apply to the spirit of God that animates His worship that could be anywhere, for it cannot be confined to any specific political or geographical region.112 Augustine’s notion of two cities follows in the New Testament tradition that uncouples individuals from particular places and ethnic or civic identities, in keeping with postexilic biblical texts written to an audience no longer defined by land or ethnicity. The rhetorical purpose is conversion, and that conversion can occur anywhere and to anyone, as it had in his own case. When Augustine discusses his two cities, he follows this tradition. Neither city can be linked to a specific geography or even history. The two cities are created by two kinds of love,

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one by love of self that desires dominion over others, and the other, the love of the heavenly city whose members say to God, “I will love you, Lord, my strength” “Diligam te, Domine, virtus mea” (City of God, 14.28.11–12; Psalm 17.2 [18.1]). The answer to the question, “Where is God?” that Augustine gives in the Confessions, following the biblical idea that “the Earth is His and everything in it” (Psalm 94.4–5 [95.4–5) or Jesus’ remark that “my kingdom does not belong to this world” (John 18.36), synthesizes one strand of Christian notions of history and geography. He answered himself, “Do heaven and earth, then, contain the whole of you, since you fill them? Or when once you have filled them, is some part of you left over because they are too small to hold you? . . . Or is it that you have no need to be contained in anything, because you contain all things in yourself and fill them by reason of the very fact that you contain them?” (1.3.1).113 Augustine’s theology claims all space and time as a universal divine territory, thus erasing territorial, cultural, political, and social boundaries commonly regulating human life, particularly the kinds that had sustained the Roman imperium for the previous 400 years. He created the space for the claims of the individual conscience that stood outside and even against the demands of the saeculum, proposing that service of one another in love as the expression of divine love built the city of God.

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Dante’s Monarchia with and against Augustine

Ecce quam bonum et quam iocundum, habitare fratres in unum Psalm 132.1 (133.1) When Dante concludes Book 1 of the Monarchia with a quotation from Psalm 132 (133), “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity,” he expresses his ardent hope for an end to the civic disorder of his times. Informing the entire tract, this idea of civic unity, in contrast to tyranny, mob violence, or oligarchy, of course, is a mainstay of Aristotelian political theory, which Dante encountered either directly or through Thomas Aquinas and his followers.1 In Monarchia, Dante seeks to argue how such unity once existed and can exist again in the temporal order. When Augustine uses this same quotation in Book 12 of the City of God, he does so in the context of discussing God’s design that the human race rose from one man so that it could be clear how pleasing to God is “oneness” among many (12.23). Augustine does not connect this unity to the temporal order, and indeed the City of God actually argues that God, foreknowing that Adam would sin, had already foreordained that some mortals might eventually know this unity, but only in the society of angels. As discussed in the last chapter, for Augustine, the unity that Dante imagines had existed under the Roman Empire could exist exclusively among the people of God and not in the temporal political order.2 Charles Till Davis attributes the difference between Augustine and Dante to “the basic optimism of the Thomistic tradition . . . [which] modifies the dark view of man in society that Augustine had bequeathed to the Middle Ages.”3 In what Davis calls Augustine’s “dark vision,” Reinhold Niebuhr had labeled his political realism.4 Dante, on the other hand, expresses optimism or “political” hope in the Monarchia, despite all the evidence of human miscreant acts in the temporal domain that he features throughout the Commedia and despite his own suffering at the hands of temporal and ecclesiastical powers.

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This chapter will argue that in the Monarchia Dante assumes the authority of a prophet, in this case, Daniel, ignores Augustinian “political realism,” but adopts Augustine’s interpretive practices to interpret the Bible. Although Dante writes with an apocalyptic or prophetic conviction similar to Augustine’s, it is not Augustine who informs the Monarchia but Orosius, the apologist for the Christian Roman Empire, and Virgil, the poet of the Empire. Following the lead of Orosius, Dante adopts the idea that divine providence spurred the founding of the Empire because God had been incarnated as Jesus precisely when the world was at peace in the reign of Augustus Caesar, first Roman emperor, as told in the Gospel of Luke (2.1).5 He adopts the Orosian and Virgilian Roman imperial model and, like Virgil and Orosius, he puts Rome as the “Holy City” in the world’s center, as “urbem Deo electam” (“God’s chosen city” [Mon. 2.4.5]) rather than Jerusalem as in the Hebrew Bible. He conveys this political vision with a Thomistic optimism about the potential for order in the temporal domain. To support his argument, he makes use of his Bibles, the Virgilian literary legacy and the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Overriding the distinctions among history, myth, literature, and sacred scripture (i.e. the traditional Latin dichotomy between historia and mythologia) in his political treatise and letters, like Augustine, Dante uses Livy, Virgil and other Roman poets, Orosius, and the Bible as authorities on history. As Lino Pertile has written, even if the Commedia is literary, as with Dante’s political documents, references to the Bible and the Aeneid are not mere literary refinements to be theorized, they function as the supreme guarantee of the sacrosanct political actions required in the contemporary historical circumstances.6 Both Virgil, “la bibbia dell’ Impero” (the Bible of the Empire),7 and the Bible itself provide Dante with prophecies that support the political vision he describes. The past prophesies the present, while the present becomes a realization of the revelation of the past: Scripture, besides recording past events, reveals the sense of the present. Thus, through echoing or citing biblical citations, he makes Moses prefigure Christ, yes, but also Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg (1275–1313) (Letter 5.1.2–4), who is a new David, son of Jesse (Letter 7.8.29), a new Joshua (Letter 5.3.7), a new Christ (Letter 5.2.5–6), as well as Augustus, and Caesar (Letter 5.2.10; 5.3.7).8 In this view, Henry VII emerges as the beneficiary of the Battle of Pharsalia that ended civil war, brought the Republic to a close with Julius Caesar’s triumph, and began the steps toward Roman imperial rule. As in Orosius, Roman history therefore forms part of the divine plan, as all of history consists of nothing else but the revelation of a divine providential design.

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The ideas of the Monarchia were not entirely new for Dante. In the Convivio (1304–07?), written in the aftermath of his exile from Florence, he had proposed the utopian idea of universal government arguing that to eliminate wars and their causes tutta la terra, e quanto a l’umana generazione a possedere è dato, essere Monarchia, cioè uno solo principato, e uno prencipe avere, lo quale, tutto possedendo e più desiderare non possendo, li regi tegna contenti ne li termini de li regni, sì che pace intra loro sia, ne la quale si posino le cittadi, e in questa posa le vicinanze s’amino, in questo amore le case prendano ogni loro bisogno, il qual preso, l’uomo viva felicemente; che è quello per che esso è nato. Convivio 4.4.4–5 ([T]he whole earth, and all that is given to the human race to possess, should be a Monarchy—that is, a single principality, having one prince who, possessing all things and being unable to desire anything else, would keep the kings content within the boundaries of their kingdoms and preserve among them the peace in which the cities might rest. Through this peace the communities would come to love one another, and by this love all households would provide for their needs, which when provided would bring man happiness, for this is the end for which he is born [Il Convivio, 155–6]).

Thinking of the whole earth as a single political entity, inhabited by the abstract notion of “humanity,” Dante proposes “mankind” as a universal concept, who he believes is born to live in happiness. While not mentioning the Roman Empire here, his universal government clearly reaches back to that erstwhile model. In fact, Dante’s proposal for a “universal temporal community” that would demand the “collaboration of a completely unified human race,” as Étienne Gilson wrote many years ago,9 is a completely new model for human government, for in justifying such a political structure that would be above the “Christian ideal of a universal Church,” Dante has transferred the Christian ideal of the universal Church to the temporal domain,10 I would add, reversing Augustine’s argument to separate the people of God from the temporal domain.

Context of Dante’s political treatise The Monarchia has been dated as early as the time of Dante’s exile from Florence (1302) to 1307 (because of the reference to Averroes which would

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date it to the latest time he was working on the Convivio) to 1310–11 when he was also writing letters inviting Henry VII to come to Italy and be crowned in Rome, and even into the later years of the second decade of the fourteenth century when Dante was certainly fully engaged in writing the Commedia.11 Prue Shaw argues that the differences between the letters Dante certainly wrote during Henry’s expedition and the Monarchia argue for a much later dating of the treatise: in contrast to the exhortations of the letters, the treatise is a philosophical discourse in which the poet argues for an idea.12 Currently, because Monarchia 1.12.6 refers to the freedom of the will in what appears a direct translation of Paradiso 5.19–24, the consensus dates the treatise not earlier than 1314, although even this is controversial because there are scholars who argue that this was a later interpolation.13 The Monarchia reads, “Hoc viso, iterum manifestum esse potest quod hec libertas sive principium hoc totius nostre libertatis est maximum donum humane nature a Deo collatum—sicut in Paradiso Comedie iam dixi” (“When this has been grasped, it can also be seen that this freedom [or this principle of all our freedom] is the greatest gift given by God to human nature—as I have already said in the Paradiso of the Comedy” [Monarchia Book 1.12.6]). The passage in Paradiso “Lo maggior don che Dio per sua larghezza/ fesse creando. . ./ fu della volontá la libertate;/ di che le creature intelligenti,/ e tutte e sole, fuoro e son dotate” (“The greatest gift that God in his bounty bestowed in creating, . . . was the freedom of the will, with which the creatures that have intelligence, they all and they alone, were and are endowed” [Paradiso 5.19.-20; 22–4]) repeats the phrase “the greatest gift of God” to refer to the freedom of the will. If we accept Prue Shaw’s dating of the Monarchia, which has emerged as the consensus position, it seems clear that Dante did not have any specific contemporary leader in mind as the ruler of his imagined empire, but he was deliberating on how to install and maintain justice and liberty and thereby to achieve world unity, proposing a political structure he maintained would require the separation of Church authority from the temporal order. The Monarchia is the idea of an impoverished exile, so rather than ambition or the arrogance of the powerful as spurs, theological and political hope fuels this utopian vision. As a literary undertaking, Dante’s political utopia mimics the Roman Empire as ruled ideally by a model emperor, Justinian (Par. 6), with justice and according to Law, not the erstwhile military-political project of Constantine nor the politicalmonarchical aspirations of the French kings who had captured the papacy, in residence at Avignon, and who stood poised to dominate Europe.

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However, whether early or late, for this study, what matters is the argument about the role of providence (also developed in the political letters) that promotes the Orosian heritage and rejects Augustine, while never engaging directly with Augustine’s historical or political theories. The fact that a late dating may reveal that Dante seems able to sustain contradictory viewpoints even in the same period in his literary career demonstrates the deliberative character of the Monarchia.14 Taking biblical authority to himself, Dante does not define auctoritas in the Monarchia, but he assumes it, and authority, or a related word, is used more frequently than in any other of Dante’s works (in all 66 references in the treatise).15 Adopting this authoritative voice, Dante seems to confront Augustine’s politics in the Monarchia, while never directly citing his words. Although he defers to him as a Church doctor and authority (3.3.13), he only quotes from him on one occasion and interestingly, this is specifically to address interpretive strategies that in fact Dante uses for his own polemical purposes in the treatise. Thus, Dante adopts Augustine’s argument about the “mystical sense” as argued in the City of God that not all “reported events” have a further meaning (16.2) and that finding meaning in Scripture that was not intended also will lead the reader astray (De Doct. Christ. [1.36–7]). Assuming Augustine’s authority, therefore, Dante suggests that two kinds of errors can occur when looking for the mystical sense of texts: one creating a level of meaning when it does not exist and the other creating a far-fetched meaning that is inadmissible (Monarchia 3.4.7–8).16 This hermeneutical position becomes Dante’s entryway into undermining the Church’s claimed authority over secular government, an authority sustained with the support of biblical passages. Thus, Dante uses Augustinian hermeneutical principles to support his political argument, in essence, adopting Augustine’s interpretive strategies to shore up a political theory that conflicts with Augustine’s. This is a concrete example of how Dante defines and marginalizes the authority of others while claiming his own authority based on proof texts (whether from the Bible or Latin authorities) that support his argument. Furthermore, in Monarchia Book 2, he also proposes reason and the divinity as the authorities that give his argument deliberative power, thus appropriating divine authority to himself. In Book 3, he adopts the authority of the prophet Daniel to delineate the correct role of the Roman pontiff, becoming both prophet and judge as he emerges as the just man who upbraids those who oppress.17 He also assumes the authority of the entire context of the Daniel quotation (Dan. 6.22; Monarchia 3.1.1), for Daniel’s God freed him from the

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lions, and it is this God that allows Daniel to correct rulers and counselors, just as Dante speaks against papal documents and royal claims.18 Thus, assuming the authority of a Latin auctor and of a Hebrew prophet, Dante debates the central political issues of his time—the institutional authority of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Roman Catholic Church.19 While the Monarchia did circulate during Dante’s lifetime, as far as acquiring any authoritative power itself, it was attacked by the Dominican Guido Vernani as early as 1327, which was followed by numerous other confutations;20 it was burned in 1329 by order of Cardinal Bertrando del Poggetto, a legate of Pope John XXII, and when it became very popular in Germany during the Reformation, it was suppressed by the Church and put on the index of forbidden books in 1554, where it remained until the nineteenth century. Pope Leo XIII finally removed it from the Index in 1881.21 Similar issues to those posed theoretically in the Monarchia were expressed as concrete politics in several of his political letters (5, 6, 7, and 11). Letter 5 (of thirteen that are attributed to Dante), dated 1310, addresses Henry, Duke of Luxembourg, elected emperor two years earlier as Henry VII, at the time that he began his Italian campaign. It expresses Dante’s elation that Henry is entering Italy to be crowned in Rome, rekindling his hope for a restored Roman Empire. Letters 6 and 7 were both written within weeks of each other in 1311, the former to Florentines and the latter to Henry, with different purposes, although both exhort a return to the Roman imperial model. Letter 11 is written to the Italian cardinals on the occasion of Clement V’s death in April 1314 and like the letters proposing an imperial seat in Rome for Henry, Letter 11 hopes to see the papacy returned to Rome after its exile in Avignon under Clement. As Davis demonstrates, neo-Aristotelianism and Thomism, which Dante might have been exposed to at the Dominican studium at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, contributed to shaping his political ideas.22 Showing the influence of Thomism about the potential for political order, based on the new interest in Aristotle’s Politics, some of the positions Dante adopts include the following: (1) man is a social and political animal; (2) politics is a practical art whose purpose is right action; (3) right action is living self-sufficiently and virtuously in a community; (4) because the whole is superior to the part, the welfare of the community is more important than the welfare of the individual; and (5) law supports the common welfare of the whole.23 Other potential sources of inspiration for Dante’s political ideas, particularly in terms of Church-State relationships, are the twelfth-century works of John of Salisbury and Bernard of Clairveaux. John’s Policraticus24 discusses at length the

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respective roles of king, emperor, and religious leaders.25 In fact, John frames Book V of the Policraticus as a letter from Plutarch to his former student, the Emperor Trajan (Epistola Plutarchi instruentis Trajanum), which he attributes to a work of Plutarch, the Institutio Trajani. Written in the context of the reign of Henry II (Plantagenet) when Henry was attempting to impose his power over the clergy in England, it offers a guide to princes intended to delineate the respective role of kings and priests. Using a body analogy in which the king is the head, John argues that the clergy is like the soul that represents God on earth. True, the king answers to God, he posits, but the clergy are God’s representatives and therefore the king must answer to them.26 The story of Henry’s squabble with the Church that led to Archbishop Thomas Becket’s murder spread across Europe, for Thomas was canonized as a martyr and his story spurred visual and literary narrative versions. By selecting Trajan, the pagan, as a model emperor, saved, according to legend by the prayers of the most venerable and pious of late antique/medieval popes, Gregory the Great, John reenforces the notion that the prince must ultimately answer to God or to his vicars on earth. While John was most concerned with potential regal tyranny, Bernard’s De Consideratione27 addresses the limits of clerical power in the secular domain. The De Consideratione was written at a moment when a powerful political theory of “pontifical imperialism” based on what eventually was proven the forged “Donation of Constantine” was being elaborated. Although he had played a central role in preaching the second crusade at Vézeley, by the time Bernard wrote De Consideratione, he had certainly retreated from endorsing papal or ecclesiastical engagement in temporal matters. Turning to biblical texts (Christ’s gift of keys [Matt. 16.19], Christ’s admonition that he had brought a sword, not peace [Matt. 10.34–5] and Christ’s command to “Render unto Caesar” [Matt. 22.21, Mark 12.17, and Luke 20.25]), Bernard denounces the theory of pontifical power over the State as a dangerous snare and argues ardently for the separation of powers. Focused on the Latin West, Bernard’s justification for opposing these pontifical politics bears many similarities to the third book of the Monarchia where Dante develops his rationale for supporting the separation of ecclesiastical and temporal powers.28 Bringing Bernard’s concerns closer to Dante’s time, Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam (1302), which Dante takes to task in Book 3 of the Monarchia, was a resurgence of the same pontifical imperialist theory against which Bernard had argued. In this document, Boniface asserts that God ordained the Church as ruler of the temporal domain and that temporal authority should be subject to spiritual power.29

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The Monarchia is clearly in dialogue with and invariably in direct opposition to the documents issued by the offices of the Emperor; the Pope, especially Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam (1302) and Clement V’s Pastoralis cura (1314); the King of France’s efforts to tax both ecclesiastical lands and churchmen (that Boniface VIII’s Clericis laicos [1296–98?] had argued against)30 and to unify Frankish lands under royal ownership and patronage;31 and the King of Naples, who rejected imperial leadership under Henry VII, with the support of Pope Clement V.32 Dante’s criticism of the misuse of scriptures that could lead to incorrect interpretations (based on Augustine’s expressed concerns) seems specifically to attack Boniface VIII’s very short bull, the Unam sanctam, which develops its argument from the authority of Scripture. Allegorical readings dominate the tract that argues for the unity of all Christians in one Church. No doubt with Philip IV (Philippe le Bel), the King of France, as the primary recipient, Boniface attacks the notion of the temporal autonomy of monarchs, using Scripture to argue that the Church is the institution that has earthly jurisdiction over kings and rulers. Thus, beginning with a quotation from the Song of Songs (6.9), “One is my dove, my perfect one,” (“Una est columba mea, perfecta mea” [6.8]), Boniface claims that this refers to the Church with one Lord, just as Noah’s Arc refers to the one Church. On Jesus’ command to Peter to “Feed my sheep” (John 21.17), Boniface argues, all sheep are committed to Peter and his successors. Arriving at the “two swords” of Luke 22.38 that suggested two orders, Boniface maintains one sword referred to the temporal (material) and the other to ecclesiastical (spiritual) power, but both belonged to Peter and his successors.33 With more than 10 biblical citations and references in a two-page tract, Boniface uses all the quotations to support the main point, “Therefore we declare, state, define and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”34 Another papal document that Dante is indirectly addressing is Clement V’s Pastoralis cura, which, in alliance with the King of France, had supported Robert of Naples’ refusal (1312) to recognize the supreme authority of Emperor Henry VII, and thus undermined the possibility of what Dante believed would be Henry’s triumphal restoration of the Empire.35 Dante indirectly addresses these contemporary documents on temporal and ecclesiastical power in the Monarchia, but even though he lays out his own utopian plan, because he is not prince, pope, or potentate, his politics remain a project of his desires and do not conclude in any specific political action.36 Nonetheless, as Ascoli

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shows, Dante writes as though his work possesses the same authority as the papal and royal tracts against which he argues.37

The argument Dante’s views on the Roman Empire are, of course, well known to scholars of his work. His theory of history and politics, as Davis has written, “rests primarily on memory and desire, memory of an alleged golden age under Augustus, a universal peace that Dante believed existed only once in human history, and desire for a savior, evidently a new Augustus, who would restore this unique and vanished order to the modern world.”38 Memory of the Augustan Roman imperium as a structure of civic power formed Dante’s desire for a restored Roman Empire. In this political vision, the virtues with which he characterizes the Romans, justice in particular, would rule, and the Church would lose all temporal power. But in the Convivio and in the political letters (which have clearly invited Henry VII to descend into Italy to be crowned emperor in Rome), the Monarchia and the Commedia, there is no imperial infrastructure and no concrete political program; rather we find only visionary politics based on nostalgia and hope. With none of Augustine’s political realism, Dante proposes that moral leadership (and Law) will restore civic order to his times. Earlier in Letter 6, addressed to his fellow “wicked Florentines,” Dante combines a Christian providential theory with Aristotelian political optimism to assert his fundamental belief that the Christian Roman Empire was part of the divine plan: “The faithful providence of the Eternal King, whose goodness sustains the heavenly things above, yet who does not forsake in disdain the things of this world here below, has ordained that human affairs should be governed by the Holy Roman Empire, in order that human beings should enjoy the peace that only the stability of such a government can guarantee, and should live in citizenship with one another throughout the world . . . . ”39 In Dante’s proposition for a universal government with Rome as its center, a separation of the powers of the Church and the Empire, and critically based on the rule of law,40 for “law is a rule which governs life” (“est enim lex regula directiva vite” [Monarchia 1.14.5]), Dante had to prove why a universal government and monarch “over all others in time” (“super omnes in tempore” [Monarchia 1.2.2]) would assure peace, why Rome should be its center, and why it was necessary to separate the powers of the State and the Church. Book 1 of the Monarchia deals

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with the first point; Book 2 of the Monarchia and Letters 5 and 6 propose the Roman Empire as the ideal political model; and Book 3 takes up the third concern. In Book 1, he provides a definition of his imagined idea of temporal monarchy: Firstly therefore we must see what is meant by the “temporal monarchy,” in broad terms as it is generally understood. Temporal monarchy, then, which men call “empire,” is a single sovereign authority set over all others in time, that is to say over all authorities which operate in those things and over those things which are measured by time.41 Monarchia 1.2.1–2

Expanding from this premise, Dante poses three questions: Now there are three main points of inquiry that have given rise to perplexity on this subject: first, is it necessary to the well-being of the world? Second, did the Roman people take on the office of the monarch by right? and third, does the monarch’s authority derive directly from God or from someone else (his minister or vicar?).42 Monarchia 1.2.3

To the first question “Is temporal monarchy necessary for the well-being of the world?” Dante’s answer is yes because it is the only way to maintain order in the world. Following from this premise, he concludes: Now it is agreed that the whole of mankind is ordered to one goal, as has already been demonstrated: there must therefore be one person who directs and rules mankind, and he is properly called “Monarch” or “Emperor.” And thus it is apparent that the well-being of the world requires that there be a monarchy or empire.43 Monarchia 1.5.9

Second, we note that Dante’s definition returns to the model of the Roman Empire and that he envisions an absolute temporal order that includes many realms as well as civic and political entities. He argues for regionalism within world government, through which all would be ruled by a single law “in those matters which are common to all men and of relevance to all” (“secundum sua comunia, que omnibus competunt” [Monarchia 1.14.7]). Dante’s “world government” really means to embrace the whole world, for like Augustine, whose creation theology demands that no humans be excluded from the divine plan (City of God 16.8–9), he includes the Garamantes, who live “in the equatorial zone” (“sub equinoctiali habitantes”) and the Scythians, who inhabit the arctic

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frigid zone (“extra septimum clima viventes” [Monarchia 1.14.6])—people who could continue their local customs while living simultaneously under universal law. Despite their peripheral status, Dante still would include them under the rule of “universal” law. Although Convivio (4.5) and Monarchia (1.16) recall the historical time of peace when Augustus Caesar reigned, by providence, Dante argues, simultaneously with the birth of Christ, in Book 2 of the Monarchia, he turns to the legendary story of Aeneas and the Virgilian text to prove why Rome should be the center of his political model. Unlike Augustine, who uses the Aeneid to undermine Rome’s claims, Dante reverses Augustine, and uses Virgil to bolster them. In contrast to Augustine, he insists that the Romans took on the office of monarch by right and not by usurpation (Monarchia 2.3.1). Thus, quoting Aristotle on the nobility revealed in virtue and wealth, and Juvenal who claimed that “nobility of mind is the sole and only virtue” (Monarchia 2.3.4) as his premises, he assigns the responsibility for universal monarchy to the Romans. Like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, for Dante what is best for the community is superior to what is best for the individual. Using Aristotle, Dante adopts the same theory to justify Roman aggressive wars as legal means to create this universal and communal peace. Unlike the more practical and local, although nonetheless visionary political theories that attempted to define the respective roles of Church and State circulating in Dante’s time, as for example, James of Viterbo, De regimine Christiano, Giles of Rome, De ecclesiastica potestate, or even Pierre Dubois, De Recuperatione Terre Sancte,44 Dante’s empire, emperor, and pope as conceived in the Monarchia are institution-inspired types drawn out of a political imagination,45 akin to topoi to be used in a poetic composition, for he has constructed the myth of the pax romana as a radical critique of his own age of political turmoil and fratricidal conflict and claimed divine providence as guide to its momentum.

Pitting Augustine against Orosius and the Roman literary legacy In the late Middle Ages as the idea of an imperial papacy emerged alongside the revival of the idea of divinely inspired monarchs, Augustine’s doubts about temporal politics receded into the long distant past. Although Augustine had a profound influence on many aspects of Christian theology and practice in the millennium that followed him, his political views faded. Nonetheless, despite

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the fact that the City of God and other writings of Augustine are ultimately vague about any specific political action, in this period, Augustine’s authority, based on unsystematic remarks dispersed throughout his corpus, was used to create the theological grounds for just war.46 Anselm of Lucca’s Collectio Canonum,47 made for Urban II at the time of the first crusade (1096–99), for example, was a collection of Augustine’s writings selected to justify the terms of Christian warfare. Yet, the City of God decries the horror of war. In specifically addressing the political unity achieved by the Romans through warfare, Augustine wrote of the atrocities they committed to impose their brand of order: “but think of the cost of this achievement! Consider the scale of those wars, with all that slaughter of human beings, all the human blood that was shed!” (“sed hoc quam multis et quam grandibus bellis, quanta strage hominum, quanta effusione humani sanguinis comparatum est?” [City of God 19.7.18–20]) With the exception of this garbled theory of just war that recent Augustine scholars have sharply criticized, Augustine’s idea that the temporal order (or disorder), and in his case, more specifically the Roman Empire, is not directed by God’s providential plan, was mostly ignored in the Middle Ages. The Church itself, in its claim to temporal power, which expanded between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, rejected Augustine’s separation of powers. The just war theory that made it possible for popes to sponsor crusades and award pardons for Christian soldiers demonstrates the profound rift between Augustine’s politics and Christian political leadership and practice in the later Middle Ages.48 In contrast to the Commedia, where Augustinian theology (whether his own works or through Bonaventure or other medieval Augustine-influenced theologians) has at least an equal place with Thomism, in the Monarchia Dante radically differs from Augustine’s political views as he proclaims that the Roman imperial project was a civilizing public good: Thus two things have been explained: the first is that whoever has the good of the community as his goal has the achievement of right as his goal; the other is that the Roman people in conquering the world had the public good as their goal. Now it may be argued for our purposes as follows: whoever has right as his goal proceeds with right: the Roman people subjecting the world to its rule had right as its goal, as has been clearly demonstrated by what has been said already in this chapter; therefore the Roman people subjecting the world to its rule did this in accordance with right, and as a consequence took upon itself the dignity of empire by right.49 Monarchia 2.5.18–20

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Although Dante accepts Augustine’s idea that the secular State could control human cupidity as developed in Books 19 and 21 of the City of God, he goes much further. Like Augustine, Dante also believed in the separation of temporal and ecclesiastical matters (and expressly for Dante, the removal of the papacy from temporal power). But, in some instances in the Monarchia, without quoting from Augustine, or even mentioning him, Dante seems to argue specifically against Augustine’s idea that the Romans gained and maintained their Empire by force (City of God 1.30, passim). In fact, in his strictly political works (Monarchia and the political letters), Dante returns to the fourth-century connection between imperium and evangelium, even if he wants separation of Church and State. For this historical theory that supports the Roman Empire and ties the birth of Jesus in Luke 2:1 to the state of peace achieved by the first Roman Emperor, Augustus Caesar, Dante turns back to Orosius’ original formulation (Hist. 3:8 and 6.22): All the arguments advanced so far are confirmed by a remarkable historical fact: namely the state of humanity which the Son of God either awaited, or himself chose to bring about, when he was on the point of becoming man for the salvation of mankind. For if we review the ages and dispositions of men from the fall of our first parents (which was the turning point at which we went astray), we shall not find that there ever was peace throughout the world except under the immortal Augustus, when a perfect monarchy existed. That mankind was then happy in the calm of universal peace is attested by all historians and by famous poets; even the chronicler of Christ’s gentleness [Luke 2.1] deigned to bear witness to it; and finally Paul called that most happy state “the fullness of time.”50 Monarchia 1.16.1–2

But his is not a proclamation of “epochal” events as in Eusebius, Lactantius, or even Orosius. Dante makes the Incarnation and birth of Christ coincide with Augustus’ reign of peace to propose a model of government that would control the lethal fractiousness of his own times. With a sense of critical urgency, he uses the past as a model for the present and future. For Augustine, as discussed in the last chapter, all states, including and perhaps especially the Roman Empire, are potential Babylons, whereas for Dante, as developed in the Monarchia and political letters, the Roman Empire of the Augustan era was an Age of Peace, which he wanted his own Age to emulate. Without ascribing the position to Augustine, from whence it emanates, Dante claims he had once thought “the Roman people had set themselves as rulers over the whole world without encountering any resistance, for I looked at the matter

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only in a superficial way and I thought that they had attained their supremacy not by right but only by force of arms” (Monarchia 2.1.2).51 But, he claims, thinking more deeply about this point of view, he concluded that the Roman Empire was the work of “divine providence” (“divinam providentiam” [Monarchia 2.1.3]). This remark suggests that he had once adopted the Augustinian position but at some point (sometime between 1304 and 1307), he had “converted” to the providential view of Rome’s imperial rise. Why he changed his mind is conjectural, but perhaps the shift resulted from a reengagement with Virgil’s Aeneid, or perhaps he was seeking to understand the political causes of his own professional and personal tragedy. Scott argues that Dante turned to the imperialist doctrine and to Ghibelline sympathies during the first years of his exile, when as a condemned criminal in his natal town, he was welcomed with generosity to the Ghibelline court in Verona (Par. 17.70–2).52 Despite these imperialist convictions that distinguish Dante from Augustine, nonetheless, although expressed differently, Dante agrees with Augustine on the necessity of the separation of Church from temporal affairs, but for profoundly different reasons. For Dante, the Church entangled in temporal matters and rulers stepping into the ecclesiastical concerns had corrupted both Church and realm, the reason therefore that he proposes to separate the powers. Whereas Augustine argues that the people of God should avoid the contamination of the city of man, seeking to establish the city of God as an entity outside the political order, Dante imagines that separating the entities would salvage both and establish a just order whereby both would thrive. To put divine providence in the forefront of his political theory in the Monarchia, Dante must ignore Augustine, while repeatedly quoting from Virgil (and other Roman poets), Livy, Orosius, or the Bible as his chosen authorities. Already in Convivio 4.4, Dante refers to Virgil speaking for God in the first book of the Aeneid to support Virgil’s idea of Roman destiny, “A costoro—cioè a li Romani—nè termine di cose nè di tempo pongo, a loro ho dato imperio sanza fine” (“To these, namely the Romans I set no bounds, either in space or time; to these I have given empire without end” [Convivio 4.4.11–12; quoting Aen. 1.278 f.]). Dante repeats this idea in Inferno 2 when Dante the Pilgrim, claims Aeneas as the divinely chosen father of Rome and the empire: “ch’e’ fu de l’alma Roma e di suo impero/ ne l’empireo ciel per padre eletto” (“for in the Empyrean heaven he was chosen as father of glorious Rome and of her empire” [Inf. 2.20–1]). In contrast, Augustine had appropriated these same Virgilian lines to scorn Rome’s temporal claims and interpret them as referring to God’s kingdom (City of God 2.29).

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In Monarchia, Dante refers to the prophecy of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue but not to link the birth of Christ with the prophecy of the Eclogue. Rather, as part of his pattern of mythologizing and theologizing Roman history and politics, the Virgin, as an allegory for Justice refers to the Roman Golden Age before all the schisms overthrew the “reign of Saturn” (Monarchia 1.11.1–2). As one aspect of his universalist, Roman-centric, providential theory, Dante also draws on Aeneas’ miscegenated family history and Rome’s mixed culture for support, here using a poetic legend as history, just as Augustine had, but for the opposite purposes. In this, Dante develops an original concept of nobility, for he bases it on virtue and the “mixed” and therefore universal blood of the three continents as represented in the founding father of Rome, that is, Aeneas. Dante wrote of Aeneas, “As far as hereditary nobility is concerned, we find that each of the three regions into which the world is divided made him noble, both through his ancestors and through his wives” (“Quantum vero ad hereditariam, quelibet pars tripartiti orbis tam avis quam coniugibus illum nobilitasse invenitur” [Monarchia 2.3.10]). Quoting the Aeneid once again as his proof text, Dante recalls that among Aeneas’ ancestors were Asian kings (“res Asye Priamique” [Aen. 3.l]), and from Europe came his ancestor Dardanus, whose earliest African ancestor was Electra, child of the famous King Atlas (Aen. 8.134; Monarchia 2.3.10–11). Following Orosius’ geography, Dante claims that Aeneas’ three wives testify to his “universality,” for the three-part world of Africa, Asia, and Europe provided his three wives: Creusa, his first wife, was Asian; Dido, his second wife, African; and Lavinia, the third, European (Monarchia 2.3.14–17). Through birth and through marriage, Dante argues, Aeneas was a product of all three continents of the known world, and this made him singularly prepared to lead the way to the Roman Empire.53 Rome was uniquely situated to take on leadership of the world because its exemplary “nobility” emanated from its global geographical heritage. With the basic outline of the geography spelled out by Orosius (Hist. 1.2.1–11) and Augustine (City of God 16.9), Dante combines Christian and Roman geo-history to make Rome the world’s center. Dante’s inclusive world system of Asia, Europe, and Africa follows Orosius, while he quotes the Aeneid as his authority to argue that through Aeneas, Rome combined all three continents (Asia, Europe, and Africa [Monarchia 2.3.10–12]), thus moving the center of the world, in Dante’s view, to Italy through hereditary right and miscegenation. Garnering more proof for his argument, Dante also uses Cicero, Livy, and Lucan, the latter two specifically because they record miracles, Dante’s word, “the Roman Empire was aided by the help of miracles to achieve supremacy”

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(“romanum Imperium ad sui perfectionem miraculorum suffragio est adiutum” [Monarchia 2.4.4–5]). In other words, Rome’s and Romans’ intrinsic superiority, in addition to being divinely supported by miracles (2.4.4–5, 6, 10), proof of God’s providential guidance, was earned by virtue and hereditary right54 and not by seizing power or by force (as Augustine had argued). To justify Roman right as “protection” of the world rather than “domination” (Monarchia 2.5.7), and to show that divine providence had worked on behalf of the Roman Empire, Dante turns to a parade of Roman republican heroes including Cincinnatus who relinquished his high office (Monarchia 2.5.9), and whose story both Livy (Ab Urbe Condita 3.26) and Orosius (Hist. 2.12) tell; the Decii, who “laid down their lives dedicated to the salvation of the community” (Monarchia 2.5.15), the source being Cicero (De finibus 2.19.61); Camillus, who put “the law before personal advantage” (Monarchia 2.5.12 [Livy, 5.46]); Brutus who put the fatherland before even his own children (Monarchia 2.5.13 [Livy, 2.5; Aen. 6.820–1]); and Marcus Cato, whose suicide to testify to “love of freedom” Dante lauds here (2.5.15 [Cicero, De Officiis 1.31.112]). Sharing many of the same sources for these Roman “hero” narratives, Dante and Augustine diverge in their opinions of them. For example, Augustine writes that Cincinnatus left his four acres and ploughshare to become dictator and only after losing power did he return to his life of poverty; contrasting the Decii who devoted themselves to death with the Christian martyrs, Augustine shows how the Roman heroes chose duty to the State over duty to eternal value. Taking the same Virgilian lines that describe Brutus’ acts, Augustine identifies them as the heart of Roman failure—endless desire for the praise of men and the fame that redounds from “glorious deeds” (City of God 5.18). As for Cato, Augustine does not praise his suicide in the face of Julius Caesar’s triumph; rather, since Cato had enjoined his son to seek clemency from Caesar, Augustine questions whether the suicide was actually because he could not bear the dishonor of having opposed Caesar who had now vanquished his opposition (City of God 1.23). To justify Roman right, almost in a direct confrontation with Augustine and his intellectual heirs, Dante explains in the Monarchia: So let those who pass themselves off as sons of the church stop attacking the Roman Empire, seeing that Christ the bridegroom sanctioned it in this way at the beginning and at the end of his earthly campaign. And I consider it now sufficiently proven that the Roman people took over the empire of the world by right.55 Monarchia 2.11.7

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Again, Dante maintains that his ideal monarchy, the Roman Empire, obtained universal dominion justly and legitimately and more importantly, by divine will.56

False and true allegories Dante makes ample use of Scripture for the two main aspects of his tract: linking Rome’s history to Christianity and the argument for the separation of powers in Book 3.57 While citing Augustine’s warnings about dangerous biblical interpretation, Dante nonetheless launches into some elaborate historical and political allegories of his own to advance the argument for the separation of powers and to justify his providential historical theory. To tie evangelium and imperium, Dante makes biblical narratives of the birth and death of Jesus coincide with the reigns of the first two Roman emperors. Thus, in Book 2, Chapter 10, moving from rational arguments and his Roman poets as his authorities to a Christian argument that deploys biblical quotes as proof texts, he writes, “Up to this point our thesis has been proved by arguments which are mainly based on rational principles; but now it must be proved again from the principles of the Christian faith” (Monarchia 2.10.1).58 Of course, Luke 2.1 appears at the heart of this, “Christ chose to be born of his Virgin Mother under an edict emanating from Roman authority, so that the Son of God made man might be enrolled as a man in that unique census of the human race” (Monarchia 2.10.6). On this premise, Dante can argue that the Incarnation, which occurred simultaneously with the birth of the Empire, and the crucifixion under the jurisdiction of Tiberius Caesar (Luke 23.11) were both sanctioned by Christ: And Tiberius Caesar, whose representative Pilate was, would not have had jurisdiction over the whole of mankind unless the Roman Empire had existed by right. This is why Herod, although he did not know what he was doing (any more than Caiaphas did when he spoke the truth by heavenly decree) sent Christ back to Pilate to be judged, as Luke relates in his Gospel.59 Monarchia 2.11.5–6

Having ended Book 1 with the coincidence of Augustus Caesar’s census and the birth of Christ to effect a parallel plan for mankind’s salvation with Roman political renewal (Monarchia 1.16), Dante continues to build the historical coincidence by ending Book 2 with Tiberius Caesar, the second emperor and

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instrument of the Crucifixion and thus the Redemption (Monarchia 2.11). Thus, Dante draws parallels between Roman and sacred history. In identifying Tiberius as the human agent responsible for God’s plan for human salvation, with perfect symmetry Dante boldly ties Roman imperial history to God’s divine plan. To make his argument for the separation of powers in Book 3, Dante relies heavily on biblical texts for which he provides an allegorical interpretation.60 Of the six arguments, three come from Hebrew Scriptures and three from the New Testament.61 His justification for what he proposes relies not only on biblical proof texts but also on his own biblically inspired prophetic voice. Opening Book 3 with a quote from the prophet Daniel, he assumes the authority of the prophet and gives his own work a prophetic role: “Conclusit ora leonum, et non nocuerunt michi: quia coram eo iustitia inventa est in me” (“He shut the lions’ mouth, and they did not harm me, for in his sight righteousness was found in me” [Dan. 6.22] Monarchia 3.1.1). To confront the papacy’s appropriation of imperial power to itself, he pits his own authoritative reading of the Bible against papal authority. With a rhetorical display of biblical citations, in fact, at 3.1, as he begins his assay against the temporal power of the papacy, he cites Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel, and Proverbs, as well as Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians and to the Colossians, but not to sustain an argument. Rather, he uses these quotations as his inspiration to speak out vociferously in the tradition of the prophets as the bearer of the truth. Like the sixth among the glorious poets of the ancient world in Limbo (Inf. 4), where he joins Homer, Virgil, Horace, Lucan, and Ovid, here Dante becomes the fifth warrior armed with the “breast-plate of faith,” who speaks the truth following the authority of Daniel, Psalms (David), Isaiah, and Paul62: . . . then having taken heart from the words of Daniel cited above, in which divine power is said to be a shield of the defenders of truth, and putting on ‘the breast-plate of faith’ as Paul exhorts us (1 Thess. 5.8), afire with that burning coal which one of the seraphim took from the heavenly altar to touch Isaiah’s lips (Isa. 6.6–7), I shall enter the present arena, and, by his arm who freed us from the power of darkness [Coloss. 1.13] with his blood, before the eyes of the world I shall cast out the wicked and the lying from the ring. What should I fear, when the Spirit who is coeternal with the Father and the Son says through the mouth of David: “the righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance and shall not be afraid of ill report” (Psalms 111.7 [112.6–7]). Monarchia 3.1.3–463

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Moving to the question at hand, Dante writes, “The present question, therefore, which we are now to investigate, concerns the ‘two great lights’ (Gen. 1.16) that is the Roman Pope and the Roman Prince; and the point at issue is whether the authority of the Roman monarch, who is monarch of the world by right, as was proved in the second book, derives directly from God . . . by which I mean Peter’s successor, who assuredly holds the keys to the kingdom of heaven” (Monarchia 3.1.5).64 The Monarchia pushes Dante’s position that the corruption of both the temporal and religious order stemmed from the mixing of the two roles, a mixing that in the medieval period was (wrongly) attributed to the Donation of Constantine. Proved to be a forgery in 1440 by the Italian reformer Lorenzo Valla,65 the document probably dates from the middle of the eighth century. The first official reference to it is in a Letter of Pope Hadrian to Charlemagne in which he asks him to follow Constantine’s example and defend papal interests. In Dante’s time, it was believed to be authentic and that the Donation gave the Church power over the temporal order. Inferno 19 confronts the consequences of the mixing of powers and the resultant demise of the moral authority of the papacy with apocalyptic language, pointing to Constantine’s gift as its cause: “Ahi, Constantin, di quanto mal fu matre,/non la tua conversion, ma quella dote/ che da te prese il primo ricco patre” (“Ah Constantine, of how much ill was mother, not your conversion, but that dowry which the first rich Father took from you!” [Inf. 19.115–18]). In the same vein, in Monarchia, Dante explains: Again some people maintain that the Emperor Constantine, cured of leprosy by the intercession of Sylvester who was then supreme pontiff, made a gift to the church of the seat of empire (i.e. Rome) along with many other imperial privileges. From this they argue that since that time no one can take on those imperial privileges unless he receives them from the church, to whom (they say) they belong; and it would indeed follow from this that the one authority was dependent on the other, as they claim.66 Monarchia 3.10.1

Furthermore, Dante argues both against the supposed imperial decision and the papal acceptance: “ . . . Constantine was not in a position to give away the privileges of empire, nor was the church in a position to accept them” (Monarchia 3.10.4).67 Why does Dante deny him this privilege, because “nobody has the right to do things because of an office he holds which are in conflict with that office . . . ” (Monarchia 3.10.5)?68

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A rereading of scriptural passages provides one weapon for Dante’s argument to separate the powers. Here, he applies an interpretive strategy combined with Aristotelian logic to counter allegorical readings of the same biblical passages used to support papal power and privilege over the temporal domain. The creation of the “two great lights” (sun and moon) in Gen. 1.16–18 that from as early as the fourth century had been used to bolster the papal argument for supremacy over the temporal order, he argues, is based on an allegorical misreading of scriptures.69 Following Augustine’s point about false allegories to show that this interpretation of the “two lights” is incorrect,70 Dante argues that it is not the words themselves that convey the meaning, but the “intention of the author,” the “context” of the pericope in the Bible, and the metaphorical implications.71 Applying Aristotelian logic and a literal approach to Genesis, he confronts the two lights’ reading to undermine the papal position and the false allegory. Aristotle provides the “accident” argument whereby Dante can label ecclesiastical and temporal power as human inventions, which could not exist before man existed. Second, based on logic and chronology, Dante argues that according to the order of creation as told in Genesis, the powers were created on the fourth day and man not until the sixth and in the state of innocence in the garden, man would not have needed these structures of law and order.72 Innocent III was the first to use the “two lights” analogy in an 1198 letter addressed to Acerbo Falseroni and the Tuscan nobility in which he argued that the nobility were the moon, which receives its light from the sun. By Dante’s time, the analogy was well established and Boniface VIII and Clement V reaffirmed the analogy in the argument for papal supremacy.73 But Dante sets out to dismantle the strained allegory and when he examines the passage logically, he can conclude: . . . the temporal realm does not owe its existence to the spiritual realm, nor its power (which is its authority), and not even its function in an absolute sense; but it does receive from it the capacity to operate more efficaciously through the light of grace which in heaven and on earth the blessing of the supreme Pontiff infuses into it . . . for [the argument] runs like this: the moon receives its light from the sun, which is the spiritual power; the temporal power is the moon; therefore the temporal power receives its authority from the spiritual power. . . . in the predicate of the conclusion they put “authority,” and these are two different things in respect of their subject and their meaning, as we have seen.74 Monarchia 3.4.20–2

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What Dante rejects adamantly is that “authority” comes to the temporal from the spiritual domain. Inserting his own ample allegorical reading that stretches the original text to suit his conclusion, he makes the moon the temporal power that receives light from the spiritual power, the sun. In another rereading of Scripture, Dante addresses how Gen. 29.34–5, the births of Levi and Judah, have been misinterpreted as a prefiguration of the separation of powers and the superior position of priestly authority. Dante dismisses this as false logic and as a gross misreading of Scripture based on false allegories and analogies that erroneously equate birth order with authority: . . . from the loins of Jacob there came forth a prefiguration of these two powers, in the persons of Levi and Judah: the one was the father of the priesthood, the other of temporal power. From this they go on to argue: the church stands in the same relation to the empire as Levi stood to Judah; Levi preceded Judah in birth, as we read in the biblical account; therefore the church precedes the empire in authority. Now this point too is easily refuted, for when they say that Levi and Judah, the sons of Jacob, prefigure those powers—. . . I say again . . . “authority” is one thing and “birth” another.75 Monarchia 3.5.1–3

Arguing against misguided biblical allegories and biblical prefigurations that had been deployed to establish papal supremacy, Dante then moves to using the Bible as history, for “God’s vicar” was claiming its authority over the temporal order as analogous to God having chosen Samuel as priest to appoint and remove Saul as King of Israel, which Dante contradicts by asserting that Samuel, on this occasion, was acting as an emissary or messenger of God’s command, not as a precedent for other cases (Monarchia 3.6.1–4).76 Here, Dante takes the Bible as a legitimate historical precedent to argue that a wrong interpretation had supported papal claims to authority. Just the contrary, he argues, Samuel’s selection of Saul as king was a special case in which he had functioned as God’s messenger. He also confronts the papal argument that the gifts from the three Magi to Jesus (Matt. 2.1–13), specifically gold and frankincense, signify “God is the Lord of spiritual and temporal things; the supreme Pontiff is God’s vicar; therefore he is the lord of spiritual and temporal things.” This Dante contests logically, using Aristotle as his tutor on syllogistic reasoning to argue that it is not possible for Peter’s successor to be equivalent to divine authority (Monarchia 3.7.2–3). To sustain his position, Dante also employs some of the same quotes from the New Testament that Boniface VIII had used in Unam sanctam and in his

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Allegacio (1303) and which were later cited by Clement V to bolster the Church’s argument that only spiritual authority can judge earthly power or that the spiritual authority has precedence over all other forms of authority.77 Recalling Matthew’s recounting of Christ’s words to Peter: “And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven” (Matt. 16.19), Dante posits that the Church cannot base its claim to supremacy over all matters on this foundation: “On this they base their argument that God has granted to Peter’s successor the power to bind and loose all things; and they infer from this that he can ‘loose’ the laws and decrees of the empire, and ‘bind’ laws and decrees in the place of the temporal power” (Monarchia 3.8.2).78 Where does Dante find grounds for this argument? Pitting one biblical quote against another to take on the illogical consequences of the Church’s position, he recalls that Christ also said to Peter, “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” that is, “I shall make you gate-keeper of the kingdom of heaven” (Monarchia 3.8.9). To counter the Church, Dante turns here to a linguistic argument, an essential feature of Augustinian biblical hermeneutics (De Doct. Christ. 2.10–13), for the “whatsoever” (quodcunque) in the quotation he takes to mean “all that” (omne quod), that is, “all that pertains to this office you shall have the power to loose and bind,” thus limiting the “whatsoever” to the range of reference, in this case “the office of the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” This Dante accepts, but he categorically denies that this phrase could possibly have applied to Peter’s or his successors’ power to “loose and bind the decrees or laws of the empire” (Monarchia 3.8, 9–10). Using the false allegory accusation again, Dante systematically exposes Boniface VIII’s argument about Peter’s words spoken to Christ in Luke when he says, “Behold here are two swords” (Monarchia 3.9.1; quoting Luke 22.38). The Church had argued that the two swords allegorically referred to the two powers, which Peter was to possess wherever he found himself. The Church, Dante claimed, “argue[s] that those two powers as far as their authority is concerned reside with Peter’s successor. This too must be answered by demolishing the allegorical interpretation on which they base their argument. For they claim that those two swords alluded to by Peter signify the two powers [temporal and spiritual]” (Monarchia 3.9.1–2).79 Dante exposes this already very tenuous allegorical interpretation by claiming that the Church’s position is at odds with Christ’s intention. Adopting another feature of Augustine’s hermeneutics (De Doct. Christ. 3.2), he argues that one must examine the context of the quote, for he writes that this was spoken on the day of the Last Supper, and that the 12 apostles were present, and they were reminded of what they needed when setting out. In the time of trials just beginning, Jesus tells them, they may sell a cloak to

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buy a sword (Luke 22.36), meaning all 12 would need a sword. Thus, he proposes that the context of the reference to “two swords” opens up the possibility for many other interpretations. But Dante also uses Scripture literally to undermine the Church’s claim to temporal authority. Quoting Matthew to appropriate Jesus’ words to his disciples as he charged them with their mission, “Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey” (Matt. 10.9–10), Dante concludes, “the church was utterly unsuited to receive temporal things because of the command which expressly forbade it” (Monarchia 3.10.14).80 As the authoritative text to which Dante turns to support his arguments, the Bible proves its malleability and its openness to diverse interpretations. If nothing else, the quotations Dante and the popes cull from the Bible to sustain their arguments prove Jerome’s point in his letter to Paulinus on the translation of the Bible: we heed not what we should find, but what we seek. It is easy to form all manner of shapes from pliable wax (mollis cera), which Jerome likens to the words of Scripture, citing the apostle Paul’s own words on carnal versus spiritual reading.81 Scripture, used as proof text, demonstrates its simultaneous pliability and unreliability.

Conclusion Although Dante rejects Augustine’s views on the nature of the divine role in piloting Roman triumph to bring about the Roman Empire, I would argue that when he turns to the separation of powers, basically the subject of Book 3 of the Monarchia, using reason to argue his point, he reinserts an Augustinian wedge to distinguish evangelium from imperium: “Moreover, if the church had the power to confer authority on the Roman Prince, it would have it either from God, or from itself, or from some emperor, or from the consent of all men or at least the most exceptional among them; there is no other channel by which this power could have flowed to the church; but it does not derive it from any of these; therefore it does not have the said power” (Monarchia 3.14.1).82 Here, he argues to separate the powers but maintains that both receive authority from God. He distinguishes between two kinds of happiness, earthly and heavenly, as ordained by “ineffable providence” (“providentia illa inenarrabilis” [Monarchia 3.16.7]) to argue that these are attained by different means, the former through philosophy and the latter through spiritual knowledge that transcends human reason (Monarchia 3.16.8). Thus, he divides temporal from spiritual value and philosophy from theology, each with its own epistemological system, for the former can provide

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political stability and “happiness” for citizens outside the economy of salvation. Furthermore, since he had demonstrated that the pontiff could not confer authority on the emperor, he wants to show now from whence the imperial authority derives (Monarchia 3.16), and claiming it “is directly dependent on the prince of the universe, who is God” (“inmediate se habere ad principem universi, qui Deus est” [Monarchia 3.16.2]), he argues for divine providence at work in the temporal order and even for the “divine right of kings.” In stark contrast to Augustine’s separation of the people of God from the temporal domain, he posits that the pontiff must guide men according to the theological virtues, whereas the emperor’s duty is to guide mankind according to the cardinal virtues (Monarchia 3.16.9–12). Since God chooses, divine providence itself determines who will be the emperor.83 In his conclusion, Dante restates what he had hoped to demonstrate: that the office of monarch was necessary to the well-being of the world; that the Roman people took on empire by right; and that the authority of the monarch comes from God directly (Monarchia 3.16.16–18). To advance this theory, he adopts the dangerous idea that God selects the ruler. Gone is Augustine’s idea that both the good and the bad receive their rulership indiscriminately. Still, in Dante’s effort to develop an argument to separate the powers and establish the independent authority of the supreme monarch, he does not mean to create two separate States. Rather he argues the need for a universal monarch for universal wellbeing, for Roman priority, and ultimately for a necessary filial reverence on the part of the temporal ruler toward Peter’s successor: “Let Caesar therefore show that reverence towards Peter which a firstborn son should show his father, so that, illumined by the light of paternal grace, he may the more effectively light up the world” (Monarchia 3.16.18). Thus, Dante separates Church from State, but not because he believes that the temporal order is unredeemable, the extreme Augustine position, but because he believes that the means to redeem the temporal order in his disordered times is to separate ecclesial from secular powers. Although he contests Augustine on the historic performance of the Romans and their temporal rule, he adopts Augustine’s hermeneutical principles to support his argument for his own political theory, while agreeing with Augustine on the need for the separation of ecclesiastical from temporal power and authority. With the apocalyptic voice of a prophet, Dante applies Aristotelian logic, cites the Latin authorities (Virgil, Livy, and Lucan) and the Bible, and uses Augustine’s biblical hermeneutics to bolster his providential theory of history based on Orosius, who had tied the Age of Peace at the birth of the Roman Empire with the birth of Christ.

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5

Dante’s Commedia and the Ascent to Incarnational History

There is true justice only in that City of which the holy Scripture says, “Glorious things are said about you, City of God” Psalm 86.3 (87.3); City of God, 2.21 l’atto sol del suo etterno amore Par. 7.33 In Paradiso, Dante names David the psalmist as composer of a “tëodia” (Par. 25.73) to describe the ideal poetry of Psalms where the distinction between theology and poetry disappears. As the poet journeys through time and space into the infinite complexity of the mind of God, he comes to understand his own poetic role as something akin to David’s, not as a king of a political realm but rather as the “sommo cantor del sommo duce” (“supreme singer of the Supreme Leader” [Par. 25.72]). His ascent, under Beatrice’s guidance, comes through contemplation, a deepening of his knowledge of eternal love (“etterno amore” [Par. 7.33]) and divine justice (“giusta vendetta” [Par. 7.50]), in the tradition of Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Richard of St Victor, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure, and through his own poetic pilgrimage, the writing of the poem. As he surrenders to this sublime assent to the ineffable, he attempts to reveal more of the “truth” of the universe and the unfolding of divine love, as the poem advances. In assuming the role of scriba dei,1 Dante regards his work as a progressive revelation2 of his understanding of divine providence as he comes closer to comprehending how God’s intervention into human history through the Incarnation radically altered the terms by which humans could understand the destiny of history and their purpose in it. Like Augustine, by placing God’s abundant and abiding love for humanity at the center of his cosmology, Dante

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has the Incarnation reveal God’s providential intention to be human redemption. However, aside from this redemptive possibility, despite the general critical consensus, I would argue that it is hard to find a persuasive view of an optimistic providential guidance of history in Dante’s assessment of his own chaotic times as expressed in the Commedia. Indeed, with ultimate justice firmly lodged in the time after death, Dante seems closer to Augustine’s apocalyptic and fallen history than to a Thomistic optimism as scholarly consensus might lead us to believe. Thus, Dante’s overall sense of the meaning of history and of providential history, in particular, cannot be ascribed to isolated statements in the poem or specifically to any one of his other works. From the perspective of Paradiso, we will see that viewpoints expressed along the way are provisional in that they remain significant only within the context of their utterance and that later passages in the poem require revisiting these earlier pronouncements. It is as if he is going through a dynamic developmental process where earlier views are modified or superseded by later more sophisticated insights. This chapter will examine canto 6 and canto 7 in all three canticles, contending that while the sixth canto in each of the poem’s three sections lays out specific historical/ political situations (Florence, Italy, and the Empire),3 the seventh canto presents theories of history through an evolving revelation that goes from a human to a divine perspective.4 We might ask why Dante has chosen six and seven for this poetic revelation. Numbers are almost an obsessive interest for Dante, and how many times words are used as well as the actual significance of a number itself are often clues to interpreting the poem. But this interest in numbers is hardly original to him. Numbers belong to the symbolic system he inherits from early Christianity and from the Bible. Augustine too, for example, was concerned that numbers be understood symbolically rather than literally. The number six, he wrote, in his commentary on Genesis is the perfect number. As a composite, it is divisible by one, by two, and by three and is therefore equal to the sum of its parts.5 He repeats this same point in the City of God (11.30.1–2). Seven, of course, is a prime number, what Augustine also calls a “numerus perfectus” (City of God 11.31.2). The six days of creation brought the world and its creatures into existence, whereas the day following creation, the seventh, the divinity ceased to work. The “seventh day,” as Augustine wrote in the City of God, is when “Dei requies commendatur, in qua primum sanctificatio sonat” (“the rest of God is emphasized, and in this rest we hear the first mention of ‘sanctification’ ’’ [City of God 11.31.2–3]). For Augustine, because “seven” is composed of “three,” the first

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odd integer, and “four,” the first even integer, it can also stand for “an unlimited number,” which explains why seven is used for any conceivable number that conveys completion or even universality (City of God 11.31.4). Thus, the number seven possesses this special symbolic role in Gen. 1–2, the creation narrative that begins the Bible, and we should recall that it is central to the Apocalypse of John, which ends the Bible. John writes to seven churches (Apoc. 1.4); in the vision of heaven, he sees a scroll with seven seals (5.1), of which the Lamb breaks the first six (6.1–12), resulting in cosmic catastrophe (6.12–16). The breaking of the last seal, the seventh, is followed by silence (8.1). Then follows seven trumpets (the first six of which proclaim catastrophes, while the seventh declares God’s sovereignty over all) and seven angels, seven visions, seven bowls, and seven last plagues of divine justice (15.1–16.18), which give way to the divine vision, the new Jerusalem (Apoc. 21.9–22.5). In biblical terms, then, six is associated with activity (creation) and seven with endings: divine completion, blessing (in Genesis), and justice and the ultimate vision (in Apocalypse). While God created humans on the sixth day (Gen. 1.26–7), on day seven, the divinity rested (Gen. 2.2–3). In the Apocalypse, after the seven last plagues of divine justice, the transfigured heavenly city is revealed (Apoc. 21.9–22.5). But, we might further inquire, why six for the political discussion in Dante? First, six conjures the six days of creation, the six ages of the world, with the sixth age beginning with the Incarnation and ending with universal judgment. While man was created on the sixth day, 666—the number of the beast of the apocalypse (Apoc. 13.18)—associates the number with historical evil. Thus, it could be argued that six deals specifically with the “human dispensation,” the matter of humans, and in particular with history,6 while seven, I will argue, takes up the interrelationship of the human and divine realms. In fact, following John’s Apocalypse, we might argue that seven concerns the question of the ultimate “justice of God.” Seven, as the symbolic number for the final divine act, represents the ultimate reconciliation of the human and divine worlds. This chapter maintains that in providing an ongoing retrospective/prospective reading pattern among the canticles, the Commedia at the same time presents us with paired cantos that contrast historical/political realities with an effort to understand the philosophical and theological meaning of these events. Thus, I propose that Dante’s views of Fortune, history, the Roman imperial legacy, the decadent state of the world in his times, providence, and the divine role in history develop as an unfolding revelation as he moves through the poem and up to the heavens. Dante’s Monarchia does not constitute his entire political philosophy,

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even though he was probably working on it while writing the Commedia.7 Indeed, he expresses contradictory views both throughout his career and even in works written in the same period.8 The idea of the universal empire, based on Virgil’s poetic legacy and first expressed in Convivio Book 4, testifies to Dante’s commitment to the necessity of the perfect monarchy. It was prompted by the argumentum unitatis—the desire for peace and unity—that he associated with imperial Rome. But his commitment to the Aristotelianism of the Convivio had subsided by the time of the Commedia, just as he transformed the courtly love tradition of the Vita Nuova into visionary love poetry.9 In Monarchia, Dante seems to confuse the mission of a man (the emperor) with the mission of a divine savior, an aspect of his politics that he had to radically modify in the Commedia’s sub specie eternitatis.10 In Paradiso, he returns to the Augustinian idea that although God had allowed the creation of the Empire, he had not necessarily approved of it.11 Indeed, Justinian names only seven emperors (Julius Caesar, Octavian Augustus, Tiberius, Titus, Constantine, Justinian, and Charlemagne). Two are associated with the life of Jesus and singled out as instruments of divine providence, Augustus and Tiberius, one in whose reign Christ was born and one who reigned when he was executed (Par. 6.80–1; 86). Of the seven, only three, as Christians, qualify for heaven (Constantine, Justinian, and Charlemagne). Emperor Trajan, a pagan in life, is also included among the just rulers [Par. 20.43–5], for according to legend, he was prayed to Heaven by the intercession of Pope Gregory the Great. The fact that so few Roman rulers are singled out for salvation in itself emphasizes the conspicuous limits of temporal power sub specie eternitatis.12 To understand Dante’s poetic and political views as moving and not static or already revealed, requires a recognition that Dante (as pilgrim or poet) did not already understand the meaning of divine love or divine providence when he began to write the Commedia or when the pilgrim begins the journey in Inferno 1. Or at the very least, his poetic design directs his readers to apprehend more of the nature of this divine love as they move through the poem, beginning in the desolate state of the beginning and ending with the beatific vision. Before proceeding, let us look at how Dante uses the word providence (“provedenza”) in the Commedia because it provides a key to understanding his ultimate views on temporal history and the destiny of Rome. The word occurs only once in the poem prior to Paradiso where it conveniently appears seven times. The term expresses an attribute of the divinity or even becomes a synonym for the divinity. Its single appearance in Inferno, in canto 23 specifically refers to God as “l’alta provedenza” (high providence), who determines that the devils can

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be ministers of divine punishment, but are themselves restricted to the narrow confines of their circles in hell (Inf. 23.55–7). In Paradiso, “provedenza” appears to be an attribute of God, whose direct power orders the heavens or appears in redemptive interventions into the world. As a force, it stills the heavens (Par. 1.121–2), or as an attribute of the good (God), it powers the planets and the stars (Par. 8.97–9). In canto 11, which tells the story of Saint Francis, providence governs the redemptive marriage of Christ and the Church and led to the crucifixion, and it raised the two princes (Saint Francis and Saint Dominic) to guide the Church (Par. 11.28–35). As a response to his pending exile, finally announced in Paradiso 17, Dante says to his great-great grandfather: Per che di provedenza è buon ch’io m’armi, Sì che, se loco m’è tolto più caro, Io non perdessi li altri per miei carmi. (wherefore it is good that I arm myself with foresight, so that if the dearest place is taken from me, I lose not all the rest by reason of my songs. [Par. 17.109–11])

Translated by Singleton as “foresight,” if we take its meaning with the sense of an attribute of the divinity, “provedenza” here is a divine virtue with which the poet must arm himself in the face of exile (“se loco m’è tolto più caro”) to prevent the loss of eternal life (“perdessi li altri”) if his poetry (“i miei carmi”) falters. In other words, the knowledge of the contingent future gives Dante the chance to put on the providential redemptive armor that will save his eternal soul. At Paradiso 21, when addressing the contemplative monk Saint Peter Damian, Dante apprehends that it is boundless love (“libero amore”) only that suffices to follow eternal providence (“seguir la provedenza etterna” [Par. 21.73–5]). The last time the word is used is in Paradiso 27, where it occurs twice. Here, providence arranges the hours and offices or imposes silence on the heavenly occupants (Par. 27.16–18). Finally, and perhaps most pointedly, Saint Peter, having condemned the contemporary Church, promises that “l’alta provedenza” will rescue Rome from its contemptible and depraved present (Par. 27.60–3). Furthermore, immediately following this invective, almost as if linking the providential salvation of Rome and Dante’s charge as a poet, Peter assigns Dante a divine mission, exhorting him to “apri la bocca,/e non asconder quell ch’io non ascondo” (“open your mouth and do not hide what I hide not!” [Par. 27.65–6]), in other words, he must write down what he has seen and heard on his journey as an act of personal and public redemption. As a substantive attribute of the divinity, providence for Dante is what moves the potential for human redemption.

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To situate this analysis of the cantos 6 and 7, let us begin this discussion with Paradiso 30, Dante’s last political statement in the poem, where Beatrice addresses the corruption of the temporal and ecclesiastical order that led to the failure of Henry VII’s expedition into Italy: ... E’ n quel gran seggio a che tu li occhi tieni per la corona che già v’è sù posta, prima che tu a queste nozze ceni, sederà l’alma, che fia giù agosta, De l’alto Arrigo, ch’a drizzare Italia verrà in prima ch’ella sia disposta. La cieca cupidigia che v’ammalia simili fatti v’ha al fantolino che muor per fame e caccia via la balia. E fia prefetto nel foro divino allora tal, che palese e coverto Non anderà con lui per un cammino. Ma poco poi sarà da Dio sofferto nel santo officio: ch’el sarà detruso Là dove Simon mago è per suo merto, E farà quell d’Alagna intrar più giuso Par. 30.133–48 (And in that great chair whereon you fix your eyes because of the crown that already is set above it, before you sup at these nuptials shall sit the soul, which on earth will be imperial, of the lofty Henry, who will come to set Italy straight before she is ready. The blind cupidity which bewitches you has made you like the little child who dies of hunger and drives away his nurse. And such a one will then be prefect in the divine forum who openly and secretly will not go with him along one same road. But not for long shall God then suffer him in the holy office; for he shall be thrust down where Simon Magus is for his deserts, and shall make him of Alagna go deeper still.)

In these last words of Beatrice and the last of Dante on the political problems that had destroyed his public career and intellectually perturbed and perplexed him from the De Vulgari Eloquentia to the political letters and Monarchia, and throughout the Commedia, Dante seems to adopt the Augustinian view on the temporal order—whether of the Empire or the Church. In pitting emperor (Henry VII, who will be saved) against pope (Boniface VIII and Clement V, who will join the other popes in hell), the final words seem

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to declare the complete failure of contemporary institutional order, whether political or ecclesiastical. Divine providence certainly flows into the world, but it creates the community of saints (the city of God), which can be seen in these words of Beatrice that immediately precede her last ones, “Vedi nostra città quant’ ella gira; vedi li nostri scanni sì ripieni” (“See our city, how wide is its circuit! See our seats so filled that few souls are now wanted there!” [Par. 30.130–2]). Thus, the last lines of Beatrice, of Dante on politics, and of this canto, have implications for a reading, not just of the Commedia, but of Dante’s entire corpus where he addresses issues of the political and ecclesiastical order. Here, he reveals an uncrossable chasm between eternal justice (Henry’s seat in heaven among the community of saints) and the disorder and injustice that destroy civic society (the collusion between papacy, Guelf party, and human cupidity that had prevented Henry’s triumphant descent into Italy). Here, we see the city of God posed against the city of man, a reprise of Augustine at the penultimate point in the poem.13 As Peters puts it, “Thus Augustine’s image of the city of God became briefly, in the last lines of Paradiso 30, something different from its theological essence . . . For a moment, however, Dante had purposely altered its initial appearance in order to permit Henry VII, who was neither to find nor establish justice on earth, to find it as a member of the corpus mysticum of the civitas Dei. Dante, no longer the prophet of an imperial triumph but of ecclesiastical and imperial failure, translated the empire out of the world in which he had seen it inevitably fail into a city in which it inevitably triumphed.”14 With these last words on politics, Dante brings together two worlds that appear incommensurate, the temporal political world and the communion of saints. Dante’s literary technique of coupling invective against worldly corruption (religious orders [Par. 11.124–39; Par. 12.112–26], kings [Par. 19.115–48], the clergy (Par. 21.130–5]) and rhapsody (the communion of saints) in Paradiso parallels the separation of the temporal from the eternal, even though, just as in Augustine, it is essential to recognize, the communion of saints emerged from the woeful pilgrimage on earth, where they had lived and died according to charity, not cupidity. In Monarchia and Convivio, in the tradition of Aristotle, Dante had argued essentially that earthly happiness could be achieved within an orderly temporal reign, but clearly by the time he was writing Paradiso 30, like Augustine at Book 19, of the City of God, he had come to see that the “beatitudo huius vitae and beatitude aeternae vitae cannot be made commensurate.”15 Moral virtue guided by faith and grace given to those who seek it alone possesses the salvific power finally rewarded in heaven. Beatrice’s invective against the papacy and its

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trafficking in the temporal domain in Paradiso 30 ends the poem’s political and ecclesiastical diatribe as Dante enters the “regno verace” (“true kingdom” [Par. 30.98]). Beginning thus from the end of the poem in a retrospective view that looks backward, we will now examine the progress of the political theme in the sixth cantos.

Canto 6 Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso: Political theme, Florence, Italy, and empire At 115 lines, Inferno 6, the circle of the gluttons, constitutes the shortest canto in the entire poem. Dante’s first encounter with a fellow citizen, the canto also makes the first prophecy of the poem, a prophecy that is increasingly clarified as the poem progresses (Inf. 10; Inf. 15; Inf. 24; and, of course, Par. 17). The prophecy ties Florence’s internecine quarrels to Dante poet’s personal fortunes and papal politics. With its focus on the city of Florence, the canto has Ciacco, the first Florentine citizen in the poem (besides Dante), name Florence “la tua città” (“Your city” [6.49]) and “your” citizens (6.52), to condemn it as a city of envy, given to constant party squabbles, where only two just men (Inf. 6.73) are spared the three deadly sins that dominate the city: pride, envy, and avarice (Inf. 6.74–5). The three deadly sins with which Ciacco characterizes the Florence of the present and immediate past contrast with the “sobria e pudica” (“sober and chaste”) city that Cacciaguida recalls in Paradiso 15, in a nostalgic look backward to the Golden Age Florence of two centuries earlier (15.99). In contrast, in Dante’s time, Florence is the city whose name spreads throughout Hell: “poi che se’ sì grande/che per mare e per terra batti l’ali,/e per lo ‘nferno tuo nome si spande!” (“since you are so great that over sea and land you beat your wings, and your name is spread through Hell!” [Inf. 26.1–3]). Dante inquires about the Florentine leaders Farinata, Tegghiaio, Rusticucci, Arrigo, and Mosca, all belonging to the first half of the thirteenth century, and all reputable civic leaders, and is told that they are among “l’anime più nere” (“the blackest souls” [Inf. 6.85]). Active before the current decay in civic life that characterizes Dante’s own time, they were actually good leaders, but still find themselves among the damned. Thus, Dante implies that civic morality does not necessarily open the gates of Paradise.16 At line 62, Dante asks “s’alcun v’è giusto” (“if anyone is just”) in Florence, and is answered that “Two are just” (“Giusti son due” [6.73]). Although not identified (whether generalized as in Uberto Limentani’s argument or indeed, whether one

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is Dante17), the two just men that Ciacco claims remain in Florence, introduces the idea of justice into the civic domain. The question refers us to Cicero and Augustine on the nature of the commonwealth because Cicero had argued that a commonwealth is “an association united by a common sense of right and a community of interest” under the umbrella of justice (City of God 19.21, quoting Cicero, Republic 2.42 f.).18 As Francesco Mazzoni wrote about these lines, here Dante is asking if there is any seed of justice that remains in Florence, and indeed the answer appears to be a hard and definitive denial of any hope for the civil community.19 The two just but impotent men who remain in Florence serve to contrast civic justice with the eternal or perfect divine justice that will make the suffering of the damned even worse [Inf. 6.103–11], a theme Purgatorio 6 and Paradiso 6 will specifically revisit. Before proceeding, let us look at this word “giusto” and its related parts of speech, its feminine form, “giusta” and plural “giuste,” “giustamente,” “giustissimi,” and “giustizia” in the Commedia because these words, whether as adjectives, nominatives, modifiers, or proper nouns occur frequently and are crucial to the entire poem, and especially in cantos 6 and 7. In the canto 6s, “giusti” (Inf. 6.73; Purg. 6.120), “giustizia” (Purg. 6.130; Par. 6.88, 105, 121), and “giusto” (Inf. 6.62; Purg. 6.100, and Par. 6.137) occur precisely nine times, Beatrice’s number, and therefore significant for Dante.20 The word “giustizia,” itself occurs a symbolic three times in Paradiso 6 and only once in Paradiso 7, but a form of the word appears precisely seven times in Paradiso 7, a perfect and a biblically symbolic number: “giusta” (20, 50, 51), “giustamente” (20, 42), “giuste” (84), and “giustizia” (119). The only other occurrence in the canto 7s is in Inferno 7.19, when Dante proclaims, “Ahi giustizia di Dio!” (“Ah, Justice of God!”). The select use of the words “just persons,” “just,” “justice,” and their other parts of speech throughout the poem emphasizes how central the theme of justice in this world is to the entire project of the Commedia. But, the precise number of times the word occurs in cantos 6 and 7 foregrounds the divine economy of worldly and otherworldly concepts of justice and the divine commitment to the gift of ultimate justice. Showcasing his fondness for numerology, Dante uses these numbers symbolically to reenforce the theology of the cantos. In these paired cantos that deliberate on the earthly and the divine spheres and their relationship to one another, the accessus is toward understanding that love combined with the divine economy of justice prompted God to choose the Incarnation as the means for mankind’s redemption. Issues of fortune, providence, and free will bind the political realities of the decadent state of Florence and the first prophecy of Dante’s exile, the two topics of Inferno 6. The malicious and willful actions of Florentines in collusion with

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the Lateran which would result in Dante’s bad fortune (his political exile from Florence), when he would lose all his worldly possessions, power, and position as a Florentine citizen, constitutes a specific case of the workings of Fortune. It was not his will that compelled this misfortune, as he has his great-great grandfather explain at Paradiso 17, “di Fiorenza partir ti convene./Questo si vuole e questo già si cerca” (“from Florence must you depart. So is it willed, so already plotted” [Par. 17.48–9]). Nonetheless, it is not Fortune that would provide solace for his loss, but the exercise of will would help him discover how to act in the face of ill fortune. Here, providence and grace intercede (Par. 17.109–11) to mitigate the power of fortune. Almost as a continuation and response to the bad fortune prophesied in Inferno 6, Purgatorio 6 opens with a nine-line extended simile about gambling in which Dante likens himself to the winner, the one who must contend with the throng that gathers to see the winner. The failure of leaders caught by the continuous internecine squabbles in Italy emerges as a central theme of the canto when a host of political leaders who died violently entreat Dante to pray for them (Purg. 6.13–27). This becomes an occasion for Dante to challenge Virgil about the power of prayer to affect divine will (Purg. 6.28–33), which has specific implications about fate, fortune, chance, providence, and grace. In fact, Dante’s journey that makes him the winner in this metaphorical gamble, rather than the exiled loser, results from grace. Separating himself from Dante’s Christian dispensation, whereby prayer can affect both the course of history and individual destiny, Virgil says that when the Sybil explains to Palinurus that prayer cannot change fate (Aen. 6.376), the Sybil refers to a pagan view that prayer directed to the false gods “era disgiunto” (“was disjoined” [Purg. 6.42]). This contrast between Christian prayer and pagan invocation separates Virgil’s pathetic and immutable condition, wrapped in the powers of pagan destined fate, and expressed both in his poem and by his eternal banishment, from Dante’s discovery of the transformative power both of prayer and of poetry. Virgil’s tragic epic offers no escape from the recursive cycles of history, even while he cloaks his narrative in the story of Aeneas’, Augustus’, and Rome’s imperial destiny.21 This dismal view of human potentiality contrasts with the comedic transcendence and movement forward and upward that Dante’s Christian Incarnational epic celebrates. In other words, the prayers of these sinners that Dante sees around him, like those of other humans still alive, can reach the divinity to overcome the alienation that separates them from God. Christian prayer, therefore, directed to God, does have the efficacious power to hasten a soul’s progress toward ultimate salvation. In another marginalization of Virgil (and the pagan worldview), in

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essence showing his possible lack of understanding (and outsider status), Virgil informs Dante that Beatrice will erase his “sospetto” (“doubt” [43]), if he, Virgil, has not answered fully.22 The consequences of failed politics are further emphasized in the encounter with the medieval provençal poet Sordello, a Mantoan like Virgil, which puts the two fellow citizen poets together across 1300 years, one on his way to heaven, the other condemned to Limbo for eternity. The meeting with Sordello becomes the occasion for Dante’s major digression (Purg. 6.76–151), actually an amplificatio, that excoriates Italy’s failures, an exact parallel with the political themes of Inferno 6 and of course Paradiso 6, for here the historic poet Dante, breaking the illusion of the poem, speaks out directly while adopting Sordello’s political invective poetry (sirventes) to excoriate Italy as a riderless horse (6.89), a ship with no pilot, and a forlorn and desolate place: “Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello,/nave sanza nocchiere in gran tempesta,/non donna di provincie, ma bordello!” (“Ah, servile Italy, hostel of grief, ship without pilot in great tempest, no mistress of provinces, but brothel!” [Purg. 6.76–8]). These lines echo and mutilate Justinian’s Code (prospectively looking to Paradiso 6 when Justinian will recount the reform that resulted in the Code), “non est provincia, sed domina provinciarum” (“she [referring to Rome] is not a province but mistress of provinces”). Coupled with line Purg. 6.113, which calls Rome “vedova e sola” (“widowed and alone”), they allude to the opening lines of Lamentations that decry the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians and destruction of the temple in 587 BCE, “Once great among nations,/now become a widow” (Lam. 1), lines which are and were read on Holy Thursday.23 In recalling the lines from Lamentations, referring to Israel’s sufferings, the liturgy of Holy Thursday opposes the lachrymose history of earthly Jerusalem to the promises of the heavenly Jerusalem. The liturgy serves as a reminder that earthly Jerusalem provided the setting and witnessed the human political drama that achieved human salvation through the Passion, the ultimate consequence of divine intervention into human history. Dante’s analogy here likens Jerusalem’s historic fate to Rome’s current state, both widowed and alone. Dante’s address constitutes a violent invective against Italy and the German emperors,24 in which he blames the Church for having taken possession of the office of the emperor—and the German princes for having abandoned Italy. The apostrophe with its exclamations, exhortations, irony, and sarcasm follows Sordello’s troubadour style of political invective (sirventes and planh) to describe the ruinous political and moral decadence in Italy.25 Beginning exactly in the middle of the canto at line 76, Dante’s diatribe contrasts with Sordello’s, for the latter sought to foment the very violence that Dante condemns.26 Further, in

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adopting Provençal as his language of choice rather than contributing to the development of the “volgare illustre,” Sordello committed a deliberate negligence, which is both a literary as well as a political sin, and that perhaps explains why he finds himself in Ante-Purgatory among the late contrite.27 Furthermore, while Sordello had advocated violence, here Dante decries Italy’s descent into violence and tyranny in his own vulgar mother language (Purg. 6.124–6).28 Turning then to his natal city, whose riches appear to have paralyzed its capacity for peace and judgment (Purg. 6.127–38), Dante repeats the topic of Inferno 6, leaving the last 24 lines for “Fiorenza mia” (“my Florence”), which up to that point Dante’s digression has excluded. Excoriating Florence, “l’inferma” (“the sick woman” [Purg. 6.149]), he concludes the invective by accusing the city of monthly changing laws, coinage, offices, and customs (Purg. 6.142–7). Thus, like Inferno 6, Purgatorio 6 indicts what Dante understands as the contemporary political realities. Indeed, as Perugi argues, this indictment may also be a planctus for the untimely death of Henry VII and with it the end of any hope for the political restoration of Europe’s unification under an imperial structure.29 The diatribe lashes Florence for its venality and fractiousness, describing its temporal situation as a crushing descent into disorder. That his personal experiences inform this bitter invective hardly needs mentioning, but the view he presents seems to deny any possibility of redemption for this city of sin, for him an exemplar of the “earthly Jerusalem” where human tragedy originates to infect all it touches.30 Where would we find divine providence operating in this dismal view of his home city? Dante here seems to concur with Augustine’s political realism, “If therefore, a commonwealth is ‘the weal of the people’ [as defined by Scipio or Cicero], and if a people does not exist where there is no ‘association by common sense of right,’ and there is no right where there is no justice, there is no commonwealth” (City of God 19.21.23–6).31 Still, Dante’s impassioned struggle against human sin, the cause of the depravity into which he sees that the commonwealth has descended, one of the primary topics of his poem, suggests his ardent hope for civic reform. As Beatrice says in Paradiso 25, “La Chiesa militante alcun figliuolo/non ha con più speranza” (“The Church Militant has not any child possessed of more hope” [Par. 25.52–3]), and indeed the poem itself is the expression of that hope for personal and civic redemption. Paradiso 6, more than any other canto in the entire poem, demonstrates Dante’s capacity to change his mind, or at the very least to consider diverse viewpoints, over decades of rethinking the politics of his time. Here, more than elsewhere, we see the convergence of Augustine and Dante in making providence

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the mediating end between the injustice of usurpation and of violent conquest and the advantage of world unity achieved by Rome that made the transmission of the message of the savior possible. As developed in Book 5 of the City of God, Dante begins with the installed providential theory that God possessed a motive for the Roman military achievement, for it coincided with the advance of Christianity. On the surface, this appears to be an Orosian providential theory. Paradiso 6 narrates the story of God’s design in history and the providential purpose of the fall of Troy that led to the founding of Rome. As the sole speaker in the canto, Justinian (483–565; reigned 527–65), the emperor of the East and reviser of the laws of the Empire, takes possession of the poem. The commentators on this canto speak of it as a sacred homily on the sanctity of the Empire that celebrates its power and invincibility.32 Giuseppe Mazzotta writes, “In rhetorical terms, Dante ostensibly writes a laudatio of the Empire, and as such it is the reversal of the vituperatio of both city and Italy in Inferno 6 and Purgatorio 6. More substantively this is the canto of Justinian and the symbolic transparency of the name hardly needs belaboring: his name suggests that he is bound to the laws of justice, and quite in keeping with this tenet he is the lawgiver of the Empire.”33 After the “benedetto Agapito” (“blessed Agapetus” [Par. 6.16]), the “sommo pastore” (“the supreme pastor” [Par. 6.17]) converted Justinian from the onenatured Christ heresy, the emperor applied himself to the definitive restoration of the juridical function of imperial authority; finally he delegated military authority to Belisario, who restored order (Par. 6.10–27) and, in particular, pacified the Italian peninsula. Because Justinian was committed to the codification of law, he symbolizes for Dante the imperial function—legislation and a just rule of law. Abandoning heresy, Justinian models Christian rulership, and his move to the West supports Dante’s view that Emperor Constantine’s movement eastward in the fourth century had constituted a historical regression.34 In giving the pope responsibility for Justinian’s turning from the Monophysite heresy, Dante assigns the Church the primary role in inspiring Justinian for his “l’alto lavoro” (“high task” [Par. 6.24]), the restoration of the Empire. This provides a pivotal example of how ultimately providence does not and cannot intervene in human affairs to “improve” them. Constantine chose to move the imperial seat to the East. Justinian chose to move it back to the West. The best one could hope for, Dante suggests, as Augustine had, is that the ruler will be just and that he will convert and shape a better temporal order because he is guided by his own sense of morality and his application of Christian principals to the temporal order. Here, individual freedom, human free will, is

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the operative power. Providence, as an act of social engineering by the divinity would be deterministic and heretical. Justinian’s case brings this issue to the fore by showing that a just Christian ruler, who makes moral and just decisions, can bring some measure of justice to a radically if not hopelessly flawed world. Turning from his own career, Justinian adds a sequel that addresses Dante’s own contemporary politics, that is, the story of how both the Guelphs and the Ghibellines reject Roman rule. Justinian calls this recalcitrance injustice, assigning the Roman eagle, sign of the Roman imperium, which they reject, a religious significance and names it, the “sacrosanto segno” (“sacred standard” [Par. 6.32]). Here Dante, like Orosius, has Justinian rhapsodically recall the history of Roman conquest and the leaders who claimed it, whether republican35 or imperial: Torquatus and Quinctius, the Decii and the Fabii, Scipio and Pompey, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Titus, and the much later Justinian, who speaks, and Charlemagne, the restorer of Roman leadership and upholder of European unity. In contrast to Augustine, heralding heavenly intercession as the prompt that turned the republic into an Empire, “Poi, presso al tempo che tutto’l ciel volle/ redur lo mondo a suo modo sereno” (“Afterward, near the time when all Heaven willed to bring the world to its own state of peace” [Par. 6.55–6]), Dante puts this encomium of Roman victories concluding with the closing of the doors of Janus that began a reign of peace (Par. 6.57–81) with its liturgical rhythm, in the voice of Justinian. As the exemplar of Christian imperial rule, Justinian embodies Roman law and justice. In his speech, he makes divine providence responsible for preparing the world for the birth of Christ under Augustus’ reign of peace, for all that preceded it “diventa in apparenza poco e scuro,/se in mano al terzo Cesare si mira/ con occhio chiaro e con affetto puro” (“becomes in appearance little and obscure if it will be looked on in the hand of the third Caesar with clear eye and pure affection” [Par. 6.85–7]). As Dante had argued in the Monarchia, Justinian claims that Augustus Caesar prepared the way for the Incarnation. A chain of divine vendettas followed with the highest achievement of the Roman eagle when, following Orosius, Dante’s Justinian tells how Tiberius, “il terzo Cesare” (“the third Caesar” [Par. 6.86]), in whose reign Christ was sacrificed, became the instrument of God’s vendetta and then Titus, destroying Jerusalem and exiling the Jews, punished the Jews “a far vendetta corse/ de la vendetta del peccato antico” (“to do vengeance for the vengeance of the ancient sin” [Par. 6.92–3]).36 The examples follow a course of assigned imperial support for divine purpose concluding with Charlemagne who defended the Church against “il dente longobardo” (“the Lombard tooth” [Par. 6.94–6]).

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But Justinian then turns to the contemporary “cagion di tutti vostri mali” (“the cause of all your ills” [Par. 6.99]), thus not only pinpointing the endless squabbling of the Ghibelline and Guelf present that destroys any semblance of political order but also describing the present as yet another example in the Commedia of an extreme decline from the Golden Age of law Justinian had earlier forged. While Ciacco spoke of the future internecine strife in Florence in Inferno 6 and Dante of the contemporary collapse into moral decay in Italy and Florence in Purgatorio 6, here Justinian, having praised the past, now continues the same themes of fractiousness and moral decline that the earlier canto 6s had addressed. But characterizing the present as an age of endless political enmity on earth contrasts with the unity Justinian describes in heaven where differences create harmony, “Diverse voci fanno dolci note;/così diversi scanni in nostra vita/ rendon dolce armonia tra queste rote” (“Diverse voices make sweet music, so diverse ranks in our life render sweet harmony among these wheels” [Par. 6.124–6]). The harmony of the blessed spirits, where Justinian is no longer “Caesar” (“Cesare fui e son Iustinïano” [I was Caesar and am Justinian] Par. 6.10), and where their equanimity overcomes divisions, linked by Dante poet with musical polyphony, features the perfect justice that only exists in heaven.37 In this we can see a decided turn toward an accommodation of Augustinian political realism: the city of man is the woeful pilgrimage (of political conflict, schism, and zest for glory) in contrast to the city of God where all differences create a new harmony. In turning to the story of Romeo, the “giusto” (“just” [6.137]), with echoes back to Inferno 6 with its “due giusti” (two just men), Justinian further features the cruelty of the world below, particularly because the story resonates with Dante’s own narrative of personal injustice. The political-religious analysis of this canto surpasses the ideological contents of the Monarchia not only because Dante revisits history and politics sub specie eternitatis, where “la viva giustizia” (“the living Justice” [Par. 6.88, 121]) inspires (in contrast to the justice of a long past Roman imperium) but also because the conflict between the Church and Empire of the Monarchia is not at issue here. In Justinian’s model story, the Church functions to guide the Empire morally and theologically, whereas the Emperor upholds the Law while assigning military duties to a general. In contrast, Dante, through Justinian, assigns the responsibility for the contemporary historical crisis to the political parties and their incessant conflicts.38 Thus, while this canto nostalgically rhapsodizes the Roman imperium in its idealized Christian version under Justinian’s just leadership, at the same time, it ends by describing the present decay into schism and civil disorder (as in Inf. 6 and Purg. 6), suggesting

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that justice in the temporal order ended with the universal peace in the reign of Charlemagne, the last “Roman” imperial leader whom Justinian names (Par. 6.96). But these emperors who Dante selects as model rulers emphasize that it is moral choice that creates a just commonwealth and not divine providential interventions. The conclusion of the canto with the story of Romeo further shows the disparity between Justinian’s laudatio of the past religious-political ideal and Dante’s present. For the story of Romeo, a man from Dante’s own time, records how he worked in isolation to defend justice and received cruelty (and exile) in return39: Indi partissi povero e vetusto; e se’l mondo sapesse il cor ch’elli ebbe mendicando sua vita a frusto a frusto, assai lo loda, e più lo loderebbe. Par. 6.139–42 (Thereon he departed, poor and old, and if the world but knew the heart he had while begging his bread morsel by morsel, much as it praises him it would praise him more.)

However, in contrast to Romeo’s unhappy life and unjust circumstances on earth, at the opening to Paradiso 7, the pilgrim hears Justinian sing the praises of God and “felices ignes” (“happy fires” [Par. 7.3]). These flames of souls of the enheavened lyrically express that Romeo finally receives justice in heaven, for he has arrived in the kingdom without end, the Rome where Christ is a Roman. With this conclusion, Dante seems to return to the biblical and Augustinian understanding that “True justice is found only in that commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ” (City of God, 2.21.), lines that Beatrice herself revises in Purgatory 32 as she tells Dante “Qui sarai tu poco tempo silvano;/ e sarai meco sanza fine cive/ di quella Roma onde Cristo è romano” (“Here shall you be short time a forester, and you shall be with me forever a citizen of that Rome whereof Christ is Roman” [Purg. 32.100–3]). When his earthly and purgatorial sojourns end, Dante will no longer be an exile but a citizen of that metaphorical Rome where everyone and more especially Christ, is Roman. Of course, Augustine selected neither Jerusalem nor Rome as “chosen” earthly cities. Here, Dante recenters a symbolic and transfigured Rome, as Beatrice recasts Augustine’s “heavenly Jerusalem” as “heavenly Rome.”

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Canto 7 Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso Inferno 7 opens with the strident voice of Plutus (“la voce chioccia” [Inf. 7.2]) barking bizarre gibberish. As a figure, Plutus ties the dire prophecy of Dante’s impending misfortune in Inferno 6 with the god of fortune/money, while contrasting divine justice with human misfortune, ephemeral fortune with eternal fortune, or fortune with divine providence.40 Plutus, labeled the “gran nemico” (“the great enemy”) at the end of Canto 6 (115), provides one of many connections between cantos 6 and 7. Virgil silences the “maladetto lupo” (“accursed wolf ” [Inf. 7.8]), reminding him of divine vengeance when the Archangel Michael, “Michele/ fé la vendetta del superbo strupo” (“Michael avenged the proud rebellion” [11–12]), which condemned Plutus to Hell, the same power that makes Dante’s journey possible (Inf. 7.11). Plutus, condemned to Hell, who awards wealth on earth (pagan conception of Fortune41), which he distributes arbitrarily, provides a stark contrast with Michael, who with scale in hand, oversees divine justice.42 The “antithetical parallelism” between Plutus’ strange glossolallia (perhaps Hebrew and Latin) to invoke Satan, “Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe!” (Inf. 7. 1) and the opening of Paradiso 7, in which the souls sing lyrically to praise God’s blessings in Hebrew and Latin (Par. 7. 1–3), initiates the relationship between Inferno 7 and Paradiso 7 (Par. 7.1–3).43 In Inferno 7, Dante breaks the illusion of the poem with the apostrophe, “Ahi giustizia di Dio” (“Ah Justice of God” [Inf. 7.19]), to proclaim the canticle and canto’s main theme, while foregrounding the disparity between human and divine justice, between holy or divine anger and human rage. The wrongdoing of the first group of sinners ties them to the rule of Fortune, for they squandered or hoarded excessively (Inf. 7.30). In their unremitting competition for worldly goods that Fortune provides, they are never satisfied: . . . la corta buffa d’i ben che son commessi a la fortuna, per che l’umana gente si rabuffa; ché tutto l’oro ch’è sotto la luna e che già fu, di quest’ anime stanche non poterebbe farne posare una. Inf. 7.61–6 (. . .the brief mockery of the goods that are committed to Fortune, for which humankind contend with one another; because all the gold that is beneath the moon, or ever was, would not give rest to a single one of these weary souls.)

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Virgil avoids ambiguity here to identify the insatiable desire for wealth.44 His reference to the “ben” (“goods” [Inf. 7.62]) of Fortune occasions Dante’s question, “Questa fortuna di che tu mi tocche/ che è” (“this Fortune which you touch on here, what is it?” [Inf. 7.68–9]). Given that Fortune had betrayed the historical Dante, its operation could hardly be remote from his concerns.45 The answer that extends beyond Virgil’s explanation here unfolds through the canto 7s, and more specifically for Dante’s own fortune, in Canto 17 Paradiso, where it is understood in terms of eternal life. Here, we see Dante developing a balanced view that is in itself providential, in the sense that he comes to see his own personal history and the writing of his poem as part of a providential intervention for his own eternal salvation,46 just as Augustine does in the Confessions. Virgil’s explanation of the workings of Fortune, “general ministra e duce” (“general minister and guide” [Inf. 7.78]), reflects both a pagan notion of the goddess Fortuna and a Dantean modification, for although the discourse introduces the idea that Fortune operates indiscriminately in this world, that she offers no truces, and swiftly follows her own judgment (Inf. 7.79–96), Virgil also says that God “Similemente a li splendor mondani/ordinò general ministra e duce” (“In like manner, for worldly splendors [he] ordained a general minister and guide” [Inf. 7.77–8]). First, let us clarify exactly what the “splendor mondani” (“worldly splendors”) that Fortune provides entail, because these benefits are questionable sub specie eternitatis, thus making them profoundly entwined with the economy of salvation and divine providence. These not only comprise wealth and possessions but also human worldly goods such as respect, power, position, reputation, natural intelligence, noble birth, good looks, success, friends, and children, as in the Aristotelian (or Epicurean) tradition.47 They are the very same goods, fortuna per accidens, that Farinata and by implication Cavalcanti, in the circle of the Epicureans, vaunts and that have landed them both in hell (Inf. 10). “Chi fuor li maggior tui? (“Who were your ancestors” [Inf. 10.42]), Farinata asks Dante, and once informed he responds, “Fieramente furo avversi/ a me e a miei primi e a mia parte” (“They were fiercely adverse to me and to my forbears and to my party” [Inf. 10.46–7]) as he proudly reveals that family and political connections defined him in life. Since Farinata played a major role in Florentine politics, Dante presents Farinata’s fierce pride about inherited good Fortune as directly tied to the party squabbling that was destroying Florence. Cavalcante, Farinata’s tomb-mate, on the other hand, assumes that possession of another of Fortune’s goods, “l’altezza d’ingegno” (“high genius” [Inf. 10.59]), the trait of his son (children being another of Fortune’s gifts), Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcante,

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has made Dante’s journey possible. But the pilgrim is quick to disagree, “Da me stesso non vegno:/ colui ch’attende là per qui mi mena” (“I come not of myself. He who waits yonder . . . is leading me through here” [Inf. 10.61–2]), for Dante’s journey is not a gift of Fortune but rather of providential grace. Since this canto also includes the second prophecy of Dante’s forthcoming exile (Inf. 10.79–81), the goods of Fortune that seem to have possessed Farinata and Cavalcante in life and death contrast with their loss sub specie eternitatis. Irreversible loss of fortune and consequent exile have in fact led to Dante’s providential journey and potential salvation, again sub specie eternitatis. Here, providence is entirely personal, although, as we learn when Saint Peter assigns him the responsibility to “apri la bocca,/ e non asconder quell ch’io non ascondo” (“open your mouth and do not hide what I hide not” [Par. 27.65–6]), writing the poem is an act of personal conversion intended to reform the world. The Greco-Roman philosophical tradition on Fortune holds that neither human will or divine order control or direct it; rather, like the Roman god Fortuna, it works “oltre la difension d’i senni umani” (“beyond the prevention of human wit” [Inf. 7.81]), distributing its goods to one realm after another, in a process that remains unfathomable to human understanding, “Vostro saver non ha contasto a lei” (“Your wisdom cannot withstand her” [Inf. 7.85]). Dante expounds on the same idea in Convivio (4.11.6–8), where he understands it from an Aristotelian perspective in which a random force controls the distribution of external goods or fateful occurrences. The difference in Inferno, however, is the idea of the general minister,48 which introduces the notion of an independent force that distributes and redistributes the empty goods that humans crave. This force, however, only operates within the temporal domain and therefore differs fundamentally from the divine intervention into human affairs explained in Paradiso 7. The former distributes its goods across a horizontal temporal plane, where space and time are apprehended within the realm of the senses, that is, experienced sensually and materially; the latter possesses a vertical trajectory that interrupts horizontal space and time to introduce a wholly new way of seeing and being that is outside a sensual or material experience of time and space. Indeed, the human goods “i ben del mondo” (“goods of the world” [Inf. 7.69]) and “li ben vani” (“empty goods” [Inf. 7.79]) distributed unevenly by the general minister of Fortune diminish against the divine goodness (“divina bontà”) or eternal life that the Incarnation, as expounded in Paradiso 7, makes possible. In fact, the word “bontà,” used precisely nine times in the Commedia, occurs only once in Inferno, appearing in the next canto and following this discussion on

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Fortune to draw a sharp distinction between worldly and transcendent goods. Dante the Pilgrim justly and angrily chastises Filippo Argenti, a member of the Adimari family who had profited financially from Dante’s exile, for the family seized his worldly goods. Virgil says ironically of Filippo that “bontà non è che sua memoria fregi (“No goodness whatever adorns his memory” [Inf. 8.47]). Dante’s idea of Fortune contrasts with Boethius’ capricious and cruel divinity in The Consolation of Philosophy, a power that is deaf to words, complaints, moans of humans, yet remains a wise and just instrument of providence. But Augustine’s discussion of Fortune in the City of God does help to clarify the difference between worldly Fortune and eternal goods.49 In Book 4 of the City of God, Augustine addresses the distinction between the two Roman goddesses, Felicitas and Fortuna, that helps to elucidate Dante’s own view. Augustine, challenging the Roman divine pantheon, contemplates why the goddesses are worshipped, to conclude that “fortune—what we call good fortune—happens to men, to good and bad alike, without any weighing of their merits; it comes fortuitously; hence the name Fortune. How can she be good if she comes, without discrimination, to good and bad?” (City of God 4.18.21–5).50 Elaborating on this in Book 5, in order to build his case for the freedom of human will against the stoics who ascribed human destiny to fate (which would make the actions of Fortune deliberate), Augustine, as Dante also does in Paradiso 5, focuses on human freedom, a divine gift. As he elaborates on Fortune in Chapter 9 of Book 5, it becomes clear that ultimately he understands that it is human will that determines outcomes: . . . we assert both that God knows all things before they happen and that we do by our own free will everything that we feel and know would not happen without our volition. We do not say that everything is fated; in fact we deny that anything happens by destiny. (City of God 5.9)51

Augustine, clearly setting out to confiscate any of the formerly ascribed divine forces in the universe from powers other than his Christian God, who is the first cause and has no cause, while acknowledging the existence of Fortune (fortuna per accidens), assigns worldly consequences to human will, whether good or ill. To explain why breaking a vow taken in freedom is so grievous, Dante echoes Augustine in the words of Beatrice in Paradiso: Lo maggior don che Dio per sua larghezza fesse creando, e a la sua bontate più conformato, e quell ch’e’ più apprezza, fu de la volontà la libertate . . . Par. 5.19–22

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While Inferno 7 states that Fortune is an intelligence that moves “li ben vani” (“empty goods” [Inf. 7.79]) around, in the Monarchia, quoting Cicero’s citation of Ennius in De officiis,52 Dante corrects Pyrrhus who had ascribed his political and military success to fortune, insisting rather that it resulted from “divine providence,” “quam causam melius et rectius nos ‘divinam providentiam’ appellamus (“we call that same cause by the more appropriate and accurate name, ‘divine providence’ ’’ [Monarchia 2.9.8–9]). The notion of divine providence he applies here overrides the idea of an “angelic intelligence” and equally raises questions about divine action in temporal events. This appears to contradict both Inferno 7 and Paradiso 6 and 7 because it implies that God willed Pyrrhus’s military success, demonstrating Dante’s capacity of sustaining different views for different argumentative contexts. Other aspects of Fortune are introduced in terms of contingency, divine knowledge, and human will when, for the last time in the Commedia, Dante asks about the hints he has heard about his impending exile (Par. 17.13–27). First, Dante frames the question of his impending misfortune to his great-great grandfather Cacciaguida in terms of seeing “le cose contingenti” (“contingent things” [Par. 17.16]), thus freeing God from responsibility or for willing what transpires in the temporal domain. Second, he identifies that what will happen results from chance and fortune, “ch’io mi senta/ ben tetragono ai colpi di ventura;/ per che la voglia mia saria contenta/ d’intender qual fortuna mi s’appressa” (“though I feel myself truly foursquare against the blows of chance; so that my will would be well content to hear what fortune is drawing near me” [Par. 17.23–6]). Finally, the answer, again framed in terms of “contingenza” (“contingency” [37]), a property of the material world (37), “tutta è dipinta nel cospetto etterno” (“is all depicted in the Eternal Vision” [39]) means that events do not occur by necessity (40). Rather, the “colpa” (“blame” [52]) is willed “a chi ciò pensa/ là dove Cristo tutto dì si merca” (“by him who ponders upon it in the place where every day Christ is bought and sold” [50–1]). Dante here has his great-great grandfather explain that although the divinity is omniscient, still fortune is not ruled by necessity. Indeed, in this case, it is the Lateran, the Roman papacy, that wills and plots Dante’s impending blow. Thus, in these final words about fortune, and specifically his own misfortune, Dante adopts the Augustinian idea that although God foreknows everything, He does not will it; Dante also follows the Thomistic idea of contingency and accident in

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human matters. In fact, precisely in the context of discussing providence, Thomas argues that divine providence does not exclude fortune or chance.53 Synthesizing Augustine and Thomas, Dante shows that what will occur in the future results from deliberate human action and therefore is a consequence of free, if misdirected and miscreant, will (City of God 5.9). Thus, in concluding this discussion of Fortune, first introduced in the Commedia in Inferno 7, and forming an ongoing meditation on Dante’s pending (but in fact already transpired) exile and radical loss of fortune, we see that Dante does not have a secure intellectual commitment on the workings of Fortune. Rather his position develops as part of the unfolding project of the poem both on a personal and theological level. Dante is working out his own response to the gravity of his misfortune (itself connected to actions and events that mighty institutions, cities, and people have directed) and its relationship to divine providence. Personal salvation through the poem and the journey becomes providential, but as in many texts of the Hebrew Bible in which questions are raised about the suffering of the Hebrew people, he is wrestling with the role of Fortune in his abandonment, radical loss, and eventual exile. As poet, nonetheless, in adopting the role of scriba dei, he can condemn and save at will as he demonstrates the ineluctable exercise of divine and providential justice. Purgatorio 7 continues the themes and concerns already raised in Purgatorio 6. Virgil’s metaphysical exclusion from redemption and ontological limbo spills over from Purgatorio 6 into the following canto. Virgil had to admit the deficiency of his pagan knowledge in Purgatorio 6, so that Dante would have to await Beatrice’s guidance for complete answers about the power of prayer. In Purgatorio 7, when the two Mantuan poets, Virgil and Sordello, introduce themselves across time, Dante further marginalizes Virgil as he dramatizes the providential consequences of the Incarnation, without mentioning it. When the pagan Virgil, who lives where the souls are “sanza speme” (“without hope” [Inf. 4.42]), identifies himself to Sordello, he does so by labeling his status as permanent exile: “Io son Virgilio, e per null’ altro rio/ lo ciel perdei che per non aver fé” (“I am Virgil, and for no other fault did I lose Heaven than for not having faith” [Purg. 7.7–8]). Virgil does not cease here, for he continues with precisely what this status entails: it is the power from Heaven that makes this journey with Dante (i.e. grace) possible, yet he himself is excluded from its power, “Non per far, ma per non fare ho perduto/ a veder l’alto Sol che tu disiri” (“Not for doing, but for not doing, have I lost the sight of the high Sun that you desire and that was known by me too late” [Purg. 7.25–7]). This is not negligence, like the

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sloth that characterizes the residents of ante-purgatory, but a tragic limitation, an absence of a spiritual and religious sensibility because he lived before the Incarnation.54 Furthermore, the politics of Purgatorio 6, as Michelangelo Picone argues, invades the following canto.55 In continuity with the discussions about fortune and fate in Inferno 7, Purgatorio 7 focuses on the careers of kings contemporary with Dante. The kings in “the Valley of the Princes” find themselves in a locus amoenus not unlike that imagined for the ancient Elysian Fields. But in contrast to Fortune, which distributes its goods indiscriminately, the kings, heirs to fortune, were lax in their duties and the opportunities provided by fortune; in other words, like all the residents of purgatory in their exercise of free will, they were deficient. Negligence on a number of fronts explains their present situation, so whereas in Inferno 7, sinners whose perverted wills attempted to seize fortune, even though humans cannot control personal fortune, here we find those who inherited fortune but who failed to fulfill the duty that position required of them. Sordello names eight thirteenth-century European kings: Rudolph, (94), the German imperial heir; Ottokar, father of Wenceslaus (101) and who killed Rudolph (100); Philip III of France, son of Saint Louis IX and father of Philippe le Bel, Dante’s contemporary (103); Henry I of Navarre (104); Pedro III of Aragon (112–14) and his son (116); Charles I of Anjou, brother of Louis IX (113); Henry III of England (131); and William VII, (134), all of whom Fortune had given temporal authority, but dominated (in Dante’s view) by negligence and/or avarice, they had all failed Europe. Thus, Dante’s Sordello, following his own planh style to focus on a pan-European political theme, describes the last 30 years of rulers in the thirteenth century. The list complements the invective Dante has just completed, but whereas Dante had lamented the present situation, this canto turns to discovering the cause of the political failure.56 Taking cantos 6–8 together, Dante manages to indict two emperors (Rudolph and Albert) as well as a collection of feudal kings.57 Here Dante also intertwines three themes that are critical to the project of the Commedia: politics, poetry, and redemption or salvation. The great poetic auctoritas, Virgil, who sang the triumph of the Roman Empire, admits that he is excluded from salvation because of a tragic limitation and a profound ontological absence (Purg. 7.7–8; Purg. 7.34–5). All the reverence he deserves as the singer of the foundation narrative of Rome cannot redeem him from his lack of faith. Here ironies pile on ironies: the Provençal poet Sordello, who wrote violent poetry that encouraged more belligerence, despite his negligence, is on his way

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to salvation. Morally, politically, and poetically deficient, Sordello, nonetheless, can become the guide (Purg. 7.42) in the upward providential journey. Virgil leads the modern Tuscan poet, Dante, on a soteriological journey from which he himself is excluded, yet through which Dante discovers the place of politics and providence in his redemptive poetry. While Purgatorio 6 and 7 address the failure to exercise human will in the maelstrom of human fortunes, Paradiso 7 discloses a hierarchy of divine intervention to present redemption as the ultimate demonstration of God’s providential plan and exercise of divine will. Thus, as the poem moves forward, its message becomes overwhelmingly religious and not political, in the Augustinian sense whereby the human connection to the divinity above all becomes the measure of one’s worldly responsibility and felicity.58 Paradiso 7 provides one of many, but a significant key to penetrating not only Dante’s theological understanding of the mystery of the Incarnation and redemption but also his understanding of God’s bountiful love (“etterno amore” [Par. 7.33]). As Augustine wrote, two kinds of love created the two cities, the earthly city coming from self love, whereas the heavenly city from divine love, “Fecerunt . . . caelestum [civitatem] vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui” (“the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self ” [City of God 14.28.1–3]). Paradiso 7, as Mazzotta emphasized in the Appendix to Dante, Poet of the Desert, constitutes the most theological of all cantos in this most theological of poems. Although others have stressed this,59 Mazzotta has enriched our understanding of this theology of the Incarnation as Dante has Beatrice attempt to explain how “the whole of creation is shaped by God’s boundless love and goodness.”60 Dante the poet turns to Richard of St Victor’s De verbo incarnato (PL 196.995–1010), Thomas’ Summa Theologica (III.46.1), and Anselm’s Cur deus homo (PL 158.359–431), to explicate the rationale for the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and God’s “giusta vendetta.”61 But, this theological discussion, one must recognize is not non-poesia as Benedetto Croce would have put it, in other words, pure theology. In fact, here poetry, both structurally and rhetorically, incarnates or “embodies” theology to reveal the sublime economy of the Incarnation. Dante adopts a cornucopia of rhetorical devices in a complex poeisis to elaborate the theology of the transcendent providential divine intervention into human history. Let us look at how this happens. As with Justinian’s canto when a single voice speaks, Beatrice’s words control Paradiso 7, as she gives her longest speech in the entire poem to explain the rationale for the Incarnation (19–148). To explore the reason for and

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consequences of the Incarnation, Dante uses rhetorical devices that support the theology expounded: thus, trebling, doubling, singularity (hapax legomenon) to parallel the trinity; circumlocution/periphrasis a system for “unnaming” that heightens the illogic of the divine mysteries; repetition, chiasmus, hysteron/ proteron, polyptoton, neologism, antithesis, and polarities, which become linguistic devices that convey the theological insight: unique events, oppositions between human and divine, ends as beginnings, etc. Paralleling the triune single divinity, Beatrice’s speech comprises three separate parts: Part 1, lines 19–51; Part 2, lines 52–120; Part 3, lines 121–end. From the start of the canto, we are made aware that Dante the pilgrim has not understood all this talk of “vendetta” and “giustizia” when Justinian told his history of the providential role of the Roman emperors in achieving the divine plan for human redemption. Since Beatrice knows the pilgrim’s every thought, she sets out to explain the Christian theology of redemption, and so address Dante’s central doubt, that is, how a vendetta could be achieved justly [20–1]. In the first part of her speech, Beatrice states Dante’s unspoken question, “come giusta vendetta giustamente/ punita fosse” (“how just vengeance could be justly avenged” [20–1]). As mentioned above, the precise word “giustizia” is used three times in Paradiso 6 in Justinian’s discourse on the providential foundation of Rome. It refers to living divine justice (Par. 6.88 “la viva giustizia,” [105] “la giustizia,” [121] “la viva giustizia” [“living justice”]), and the word “giusto” (137), used once, applies to “il povero e vetusto” (“poor and old”) Romeo (139). But, also central to this canto is the word “vendetta,” used specifically three times (Par. 6.90, 92, 93), more frequently than in any other canto of the poem, and clearly related to “la viva giustizia.” Rachel Jacoff argues that “vendetta” takes on “a much grander context so that it becomes a synonym for justice, including divine justice, in its punishing form,” and she correctly regrets Dante’s association of this vendetta with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the charge of deicide against the Jews.62 The vendettas refer to the crucifixion, legally achieved by Tiberius (Par. 6.90), to Titus’ destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem (Par. 6.92), and to the vendetta for Adam’s original sin (Par. 6.93), all of which, in Dante’s Christian framework, were both simultaneously punishments and gifts of love. The three events are profoundly connected to the economy of redemption and salvation (and divine providence) that informs the theological core of the Commedia.63 Beatrice answers the question about this just vengeance by turning to the lapsus in Eden. Using circumlocution, she explains that because of “quell’ uom

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che non nacque” (“That man who was not born” [26]), that is, Adam, “dannando sé, dannò tutta sua prole” (“in damning himself, [he] damned all his progeny” [27]). (Here, she uses polyptoton, a rhetorical device in which the same word is repeated in different grammatical forms, “dannando” and “dannò,” just as “giusta” and “giustamente” above.) She explains that because of this condemnation, humans lay ill and in error for centuries until “il Verbo di Dio” (“the Word of God”) descended and thus “unì a sé” (united with Himself) in one person, the divine and human, as a pure act of eternal love (30–3). If Inferno 7 deals with the workings of Fortune, which rains down goods and indiscriminately transfers them across space and time, here we have divine will deliberately intervening on behalf of humans in an act of redemptive love—a descent downward to open the way upward. Only love makes it possible to understand this—and only love explains why it happened: onde l’umana specie inferma giacque giù per secoli molti in grande errore, fin ch’al Verbo di Dio discender piacque u’ la natura, che dal suo fattore s’era allungata, unì a sé in persona con l’atto sol del suo etterno amore. Par. 7.28–33 (wherefore the human race lay sick down there for many centuries in great error, until it pleased the word of God to descend where He, by the sole act of His eternal love, united with Himself in person the nature which had estranged itself from its Maker.)

Never naming Christ in the canto, Beatrice substitutes an epithet for a proper name (pronominatio or antonomasia) for both Christ and God. Because of the human nature adopted by Christ, “questa natura al suo fattore unita” (“nature thus united to its maker” [35]), she explains, he, that is Christ, was also “sbandita (“banished” [37]), or exiled from Paradise, just as Adam, for his nature was torn from truth and life (39). The following six lines are a chiasmus, a rhetorical device in the shape of a cross that evokes the Crucifixion and in itself, therefore, functions as another poetic substitution for the name of Christ. The chiasmus matches its subject, the central paradox of the Christian economy of salvation realized by the Crucifixion64: La pena dunque che la croce porse s’a la natura assunta si misura, nulla già mai sì giustamente morse;

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e così nulla fu di tanta ingiura guardando a la persona che sofferse in che era contratta tal natura. Par. 7.40–5 (The penalty therefore which the Cross inflicted, if it be measured by the nature assumed—none ever so justly stung; also none was ever of such great wrong, if we regard the Person who suffered it, with whom that nature was bound up.)

Dante, as Beatrice, emphasizes the uniqueness of the person, that is, Christ, with the echo of “nulla” (none, meaning no one) in the middle two lines or center; he states the main paradox, “nulla già mai sì giustamente morse; /e così nulla fu di tanta ingiura” (“none ever so justly stung; also none was ever of such great wrong”)—there was never a more just punishment that equally inflicted greatest injury. With lines 1 and 5, 2 and 6, and 3 and 4 paralleling each other, lines 2 and 6, use repetition to highlight the polarity and name the two opposites, human nature and divine person (“natura assunta” [assumed nature] and “la persona . . . in che era contratta tal natura” [the Person . . .with whom that nature was bound up]), brought together to suffer the “pena che la croce porse” (“the penalty that the cross inflicted”). Echoing, doubling, antithesis, or polarity are rhetorical commonplaces in the canto, and again, the rhetoric supports the central theology being elaborated: to redress the initial injury committed by Adam and Eve in the Garden, God became man, suffered, and died, all for human salvation. If Paradiso 6 touched on Justinian’s mistaken and eventual abandoned belief in the single-natured Christ, Paradiso 7 poetically explores just what the double nature entails for human redemption. One divine act produces multiple consequences. Immediately following the doctrine of redemption through the cross, Beatrice states that through this single act, diverse things occurred: “ch’a Dio e a’ Giudei piacque una morte” (“for one same death was pleasing to God and to the Jews” [47]) to achieve the “giusta vendetta” (“just vengeance” [50]). The sacrifice restored Justice and Heaven was opened. The second part of Beatrice’s speech responds to Dante’s next unspoken question, “ma perché Dio volesse, m’ è occulto,/ a nostra redenzion pur questo modo” (“but why God willed this sole way for our redemption is hidden from me” [56–7]). This knot that troubles Dante the pilgrim, Beatrice explains, can only be understood by that intelligence moved by love: “ne la fiamma d’amor” (“within love’s flame” [60]).

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Rephrasing Boethius65 on the work of the divinity, who makes men and angels in an act of love, Beatrice explains that the highest good moves the Creator, a fundamental premise for understanding why God chose the Incarnation as the means for redemption. As Mazzotta puts it, “the Creator who made his work from chaotic matter, [was] not impelled by external causes, but by virtue of the highest good existing within him without envy,”66 because as Dante/Beatrice puts it, the more the human creatures are in the image of God, the more God likes it, “Più l’è conforme, e però più le piace” (Par. 7.73). Only sin “disfranca” (“disfranchises” [Par. 7.79]) freedom from the human and makes him dissimilar to the “sommo bene” (“Supreme Good” [Par. 7.80]). This emphasis on love, in fact, pinpoints the stark difference between Dante’s view and Anselm and Richard of St Victor in their treatises on the theology of redemption, neither of whom uses the language of love in their disquisitions on the Incarnation and redemption. Anselm’s themes are satisfaction, necessity, and sin, whereas Richard of St Victor also speaks in terms of necessity. Dante, on the other hand, in Beatrice’s explanation, states that God had choices, and it was a choice made in love that produced the redemption: la divina bontà che ‘l mondo imprenta, di proceder per tutte le sue vie, a rilevarvi suso, fu contenta. Par. 7.109–111 (the divine Goodness which puts its imprint on the world, was pleased to proceed by all Its ways to raise you up again)

In this innovative theology, we are made to see that God does not work on premises of necessity or compensation. Rather, it pleases God to raise mankind up because love moves the divine entity. As Christopher Ryan puts it, to contrast Dante with Anselm: . . . for Anselm adequate satisfaction to God was absolutely necessary for redemption, and hence the Incarnation was necessary for redemption; for Dante, by contrast, the rendering of adequate satisfaction was not necessary and neither, consequently, was the Incarnation. A second difference, connected with the first, is that for Anselm the main emphasis is on justice: the Incarnation was necessary because the demands of justice had to be fulfilled. For Dante, on the other hand, the principal emphasis is on love: God chose the Incarnation out of generous love, and thereby enabled the demands of justice to be fulfilled; but, in Dante’s view, God was not compelled to fulfill the demands of justice, nor therefore compelled to bring about the Incarnation.67

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The focus on the role of divine love in the redemption brings Dante closer to Augustine, who, quoting Paul’s Letter to the Romans 8.32 and Philippians 2.6–8 writes in Confessions: How great was your love for us, good Father, for you did not even spare your own son, but gave him up to save us sinners! How great was your love for us, when it was for us that Christ, who did not see, in the rank of Godhead, a prize to be coveted, accepted an obedience which brought him death, death on a cross!68 Confessions 10.43

Mazzotta points us to the neo-platonism of the School of Chartres to locate Dante’s immediate inspiration for the idea of eternal love as the spur for the Incarnation, for . . . the true reason for the existence of the world lies in an overflowing of divine love without jealousy. This Neo-platonic theory of love, which Dante picks up in Paradiso 7.64–6, is not kept at the level of abstract generality. The image of ‘eternal love’ opening into new loves and to time denotes—as Patrick Boyde has argued—a physical sexual embrace, and it projects creation as a fecund dance; the cosmos opens up and vibrates in an amorous animation.”69

This position follows directly from Dante’s own words: La divina bontà, che da sé sperne ogne livore, ardendo in sé, sfavilla si che dispiega le bellezze etterne. Ciò che da lei sanza mezzo distilla non ha poi fine, perché non si move la sua imprenta quand’ ella sigilla. Ciò che da essa sanza mezzo piove libero è tutto, perché non soggiace a la virtute de le cose nove Par. 7.64–72 (The Divine Goodness which spurns all envy from itself, burning within itself so sparkles that It displays the eternal beauties. That which immediately derives from it thereafter has no end, because when It seals, Its imprint may never be removed. That which rains down from it immediately is wholly free, because it is not subject to the power of new things.)

In this passage, shifting from the remote past tense (used for the Crucifixion and its results, a one-time-only event [Par. 7.40–8]) that emphasizes a long past

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and completed action, to elucidate the workings of the “divina bontà” (“divine goodness” [64]) that “non ha poi fine” (“has no end” [68]), Beatrice uses the present or eternal tense here: “sperne” (“spurns”), “sfavilla” (“sparkles”), “dispiega” (“displays”), “distilla” (“derives”), “move” (“moves”), “sigilla” (“seals”), “piove” (“rains”), “è” (“is”), “soggiace” (“is subject”). “Bontà” (“goodness”), also used here, as an attribute of the divinity, becomes yet another word that occurs nine times in the poem and more specifically featuring its centrality to the theology of the Incarnation, three times in Paradiso 7, to affirm its connection to the divine gifts that contrast radically with the notion of Fortune elaborated in Inferno 7. As noted earlier in the discussion of Inferno 7, “bontà” occurs once in Inferno (8.47), where it refers to how Argenti lost it when he confiscated someone else’s goods of fortune (i.e. Dante’s). Here, the goods of fortune that humans desire contrast with the eternal “good” that comes from virtue. The word also occurs only once in Purgatorio, and specifically to refer to its divine quality as infinite goodness (“la bontà infinita” [Purg. 3.122]), a gift that can forgive the most horrible sins (Purg. 3.121), as Manfred, the speaker, describes his moral failures. In Paradiso, Dante uses it seven times, again, using the number signifying divine completion to conform to its divine provenance. It appears first in Paradiso 2 when Beatrice explains the divinely orchestrated order of the universe, “essa è formal principio che produce,/ conforme a sua bontà, lo turbo e ’l chiaro” (“This is the formal principle which produces, conformably with its own excellence, the dark and the bright” [Par. 2.147–8]). In addition to the three times in Paradiso 7, it occurs at Paradiso 25.66, where it refers to Dante the student’s eagerness and “bontà” to demonstrate his knowledge of the theological virtue “Hope.” At Paradiso 28.67, explaining how “maggior bontà” or greater goodness produces greater benefit, Beatrice elucidates how the spheres correspond to the degree of love that moves them. “Bontà” at Paradiso 31.6, specifically refers to “divine goodness,” the goodness that makes possible the “milizia santa,” the communion of saints, who the angels praise. Generally translated “goodness,” “worth,” or even “grace,” this latter word seems the most appropriate translation, for it is the freely given goodness that emanates from the divinity and radiates throughout the universe. The eternal action of this “divina bontà” that is permanently “ardendo” (“burning” [65]), sparkling [65], and displaying its “bellezze etterne” (“eternal beauties” [66]) has no end (“non ha poi fine” [68]) because what imprint it seals (“sigilla” [69]) cannot be moved (i.e. unsealed [68]). Furthermore, without intermediaries (“sanza mezzo” [67]), what rains from it is free, and no planetary powers or angelic intelligences (e.g. like Fortune) have the power to subject it.

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Beatrice states Dante’s unspoken third question to conclude the discourse. She senses that the idea of the corruptibility of the elements puzzles her pupil: “Io veggio l’acqua, io veggio il foco/ l’aere e la terra e tutte lor misture/ venire a corruzione” (“I see water, I see fire and air and earth, and all their mixtures come to corruption” [124–6]). But, how should they decay if God created them, Beatrice says, as she poses Dante’s doubt. In the remainder of the canto (to 148), she answers this puzzle by explaining that unlike the angels and the heavens, which God created directly, the motion and light of the “luci sante” (“holy lights” [7.141]) draw the elements, beasts, and plants to life, so they are not direct creations of God. In contrast, human life breathes directly from God and therefore comes into being without mediation, and this explains why humans can resurrect (Par. 7.146). In other words, this is what makes humans in the image of God. The theological argument laid out in the canto is supported by specific rhetorical moves. Notably deprived of the extended simile, so common in Paradiso, in Paradiso 7, we can observe a pattern of trebling and doubling as well as singularity, in which three is one and one is three, all intended to support the Trinitarian theology. First, as shown, there are three sections to Beatrice’s discourse, all answering separate questions related to cause, intention, and results of the Incarnation and Redemption. Second, we can identify a series of antitheses, parallelisms, or repetitions that create doubling effects. For example, after Justinian’s singing, the canto begins with a startling doubling as a “doppio lume” (“double light” [6]) “s’addua” (“twinned or doubled itself ” [6]) above Justinian. “S’addua” is a reflexive neologism. As a word that appears only once, and as a neologism, made up to convey something that is inexpressible in normal language, philologically the word in itself connotes singularity, yet semantically its meaning expresses doubling. Because it is also a reflexive (in the present tense), it conveys the idea that the singling and doubling, in this case, occupies a permanent or ongoing activity in which the difference between the subject and the object disappears. This poetic and linguistic synthesis simultaneously carries the theological understanding of the Incarnation. Indeed, one might argue that the doubling heavenly light like the word itself conveys the idea of the doubled spiritual reality—human and divine. A second neologism, “s’indonna” (“inmistresses” [13]), feminizes and teaches the male poet, “l’uom ch’assonna” (“the man who drowses” [15]), making Dante both male and female and thus playing with the gender binary, as he, a single subject, becomes both male and female. These are intertwined with yet another antithetical double, “Be” and

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“ice” (14), Bice, or Beatrice’s name as a human and “Beatrice” (16) her name now in Heaven. In antithesis to the incarnate God, “natura al suo fattore unita” (“nature which was thus united to its Maker” [35]) is the human “ma per sé stessa pur fu ella sbandita/ di paradiso” (“but by its own self it had been banished from Paradise” [37–8]), “sbandita,” another hapax legomenon, here possessing the opposite meaning to “unita,” with which it is rhymed. At the Crucifixion, the paired earth and heaven simultaneously reacted, “tremò la terra e ‘l ciel s’aperse” (“the earth trembled and Heaven was opened” [48]). About understanding the redemption that came from this event, Beatrice offers the antithesis, “molto si mira e poco si discerne” (“there is much aiming and little discernment” [62]), which Dante as student has demonstrated. But these contrasts in the canto between viewing from the human perspective and from God’s, between unity and the scattering of exile, human and divine nature, and Beatrice on earth and Beatrice in heaven parallel the central antithesis wrought by the Incarnation. Just as these poetic antitheses or polarities are overcome in Paradiso, the Crucifixion, a gift for mankind’s redemption, reconciled the oppositions: Non potea l’uomo ne’ termini suoi mai sodisfar, per non potere ir giuso con umiltate obedïendo poi, quanto disobediendo intese ir suso; e questa è la cagion per che l’uom fue da poter sodisfar per sé dischiuso. Dunque a Dio convenia con le vie sue riparar l’omo a sua intera vita, dico con l’una, o ver con amendue Par. 7.97–105 (Man, within his own limits, could never make satisfaction, for not being able to descend in humility, by subsequent obedience, so far as in his disobedience he had intended to ascend; and this is the reason why man was shut off from power to make satisfaction by himself. Therefore it was needful for God, with His own ways, to restore man to his full life—I mean with one way, or else with both.)

In this passage, the answer to Dante’s second question, Beatrice explains that only God could reconcile the polarities. Beginning with “l’uomo ne’ termini suoi” (“man, within his own limits” [97]) versus “Dio convenia con le vie sue” (“God with his own ways” [103]); the rhyme “giuso” (“down” [98]) with “suso” (“up” [100]), and “obedïendo” (“obeying” [99]) versus “disobediendo” (“disobeying”

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[100]), Beatrice insists that only God could make man whole again: “riparar l’omo a sua intera vita” (“restore man to his full life” [104]). Of the several hapax legomena in this canto, a rhetorical device which itself conveys singularity (e.g. “s’addua” [“doubles itself,” l. 6], “s’indonna” [“inmistresses,” l. 13], “sbandita” [“banished,” l. 37], “disfranca” [“disfranchises,” l. 79]), three specifically pertain to the Incarnation and its meaning to human redemption: “umilïato” (“humbled” [120]), “incarnarsi” (“to become incarnate” [120]), and “resurrezion” (“resurrection” [146]). Beatrice uses two of these in her explanation of why God had to give himself and not merely pardon mankind, which was one option, Beatrice says: ché più largo fu Dio a dar sé stesso per far l’uom sufficiente a rilevarsari che s’elli avesse sol da sé dimesso; e tutti li altri modi erano scarsi a la giustizia, se’ l Figliuol di Dio non fosse umilïato ad incarnarsi. Par. 7.115–20 (Author’s emphasis) (for God was more bounteous in giving Himself to make man sufficient to uplift himself again, than if He solely of Himself had remitted; and all other modes were scanty in respect to justice, if the Son of God had not humbled himself to become incarnate.)

Here the words “umilïato” and “incarnarsi,” used just once in the entire poem, semantically synthesize one-time-only events and, as conceptualized in Pauline terms, refer to the divinity “Bearing the human likeness, sharing the human lot, he humbled himself and was obedient, even to the point of death, death on a cross” (Phil. 2.7–8). “Incarnarsi” as a reflexive and also a neologism syntactically brings the persons of the Trinity together into a single action in which the Son incarnates himself. Finally, the word “resurrezion” does not refer to Christ’s resurrection, as we might suppose, given the discursive context, but to “vostra resurrezion” (“your resurrection” [146]), which I take to mean the general resurrection of mankind, the final overturning of the binaries between God and man, made possible by the ultimate gift, and thus returning to Beatrice’s answer to the first question in which she explained that the Word of God descended in “l’atto sol del suo etterno amore” (“the sole act of His eternal love” [33]). Redemption, as the act of the divinity’s eternal love, “sustains the cosmological framework of the poem,” Mazzotta argues, and Beatrice’s precise point here is that this divine

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love sustains the cosmological order itself. In Paradiso 7, Redemption as “ ‘l’atto sol del suo etterno amore’ ushers in the new creation: it promises a new heaven and new earth and, through it, restores the original but provisionally lost order of the cosmos.”70 Thus, Paradiso 7 becomes a revelation of the abundant and abiding love of God, whereby Dante provides the key for a retrospective reading of the entire poem. In this theologically educated look back, Dante informs us that the injustices of human history result from the willfulness of Adam and his children, and that God’s providential intervention on our behalf is incarnated in His love for humans and for their potential for salvation. In this view, the providential and boundless divine goodness (or grace) and love that made the Incarnation and Redemption possible vanquishes all the human moral failure that fractures human society, the results of which we have witnessed or heard condemned throughout the poem. There is no place here for destined people, promised lands, or providential histories. Rather, from an eternal perspective, these human assumptions and models of temporal government become impotent. From the perspective of God’s loving intervention into human history to open the possibility for eternal life, they lose their hold.

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Conclusion: The Hand of God

Three hundred years of history, three hundred years of Christian civilization at the tip of Africa, said the politicians in their speeches: to the Lord let us give thanks. Now before his eyes, the Lord is withdrawing his protective hand. In the shadow of the mountain he is watching history being unmade. J. M. Coetzee, Youth The Hebrew Bible and Virgil’s Aeneid both attribute their successful claiming of lands to the patronage of their respective gods. When Orosius created the first western Latin version of universal history, he argued that the God of the Christians was guiding history, as demonstrated when the pax romana of Augustus Caesar coincided with the birth of the prince of peace. This idea, that God is guiding certain histories, though vigorously contested by Augustine, was bequeathed to the West, and remains a working theory even to this day. How many times have nations and leaders invoked the divinity to claim themselves as agents of God or to justify their wars as rightful claiming of lands? In the Nobel Prize winning author’s novelistic autobiographical memories of his youth after he had left South Africa, Coetzee remembers himself among a busload of children hauled to wave flags at the floats carrying the heroes of South Africa’s Boer past, the founding fathers of South Africa’s Dutch colonial rule. School children indoctrinated to believe that the Lord, through the divine agency of the Boer South Africans, had brought Christianity to the “tip of Africa” gaze at a shadow of this past glory. In contrast to Aeneas in the land of the dead in the Aeneid, watching the shadowyfuture destined generations of Roman leaders (who, in fact, belong to the past), the boys see only effigies of the past. The narrator, remembering the twelve-yearold before this parade, recalls that neither he nor his classmates, more eager for a Coke and a sandwich, took pleasure in this display of an exalted past. Rather, ironically adopting the language and claims of the propaganda, he sees “history being unmade,” as the Lord withdraws his “protective hand.”1

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South Africa’s apartheid regime, of course, is not unique in its claims to divine providence at work, as this study has attempted to show. In the period of the crusades, closer to Dante’s time, both Christians and Muslims claimed divine support for their ambitions in the “land called holy.” Just as Saladin’s surge to take back Jerusalem began in 1170, an earthquake struck practically the entire East (which would be more like Israel and Lebanon today). William, Archbishop of Tyre and a chronicler of the Middle East from the advent of Islam to the eve of Saladin’s successful siege of Jerusalem, explains the earthquake as a “revelation of the anger of God.” The fact that upper Palestine escaped this anger was due to “the merciful providence of an all-protecting God.”2 On the eve of Saladin’s recapture of Jerusalem in 1187, Imad ad-Din, an eyewitness historian, records the renowned caliph, ruler, and warrior as saying, “If God gives us the grace to drive His enemies from Jerusalem what happiness will be ours! What blessings shall we owe to Him if He chooses to assist us! For Jerusalem has been in enemy hands for ninety-one years, during which time God has received nothing from us here in the way of adoration, while the zeal of (Muslim) sovereigns to ransom her languished and the generations followed one another and the Franks were settled in power. And God has reserved the merit of conquest for a single house—the Ayyubid— . . . . [H]e has chosen to give Egypt and its army an advantage in this over every other country.”3 Laying claim to the holy sites, to the Rock where Abraham was said to have brought his son to sacrifice, to the place from whence Mohammed ascended into the heavens, to the seat of Solomon, to the oratory of David, and the oratory of Mary, Saladin is reported to have claimed Jerusalem as one of the three places of prayer identified with the prophet Mohammed.4 When two opposing sides both proclaim the same divinity as their patron in war, what possible just outcome can emerge? One side must identify the other as “heathens,” “pagans,” “unbelievers,” “infidels,” or “idolaters,” which happened on both sides of this divide. What was the obsession with the “holy land,” pretentions to which invariably implicate divine plans and providence? As discussed in this study, in ancient Hebrew history, Jerusalem only emerged as a political and religious center with the rise of the Davidic dynasty, but the Hebrew Scriptures’ sagas of its history of sackings and forced exile of the people for whom it was a holy city, became a prevailing tragedy, for which the “elect” people invariably blame themselves. The New Testament repudiates Jerusalem’s importance as a religious center and makes it the site of corruption and unjust execution as the disciples in the post-Parousia era fan out as far as Antioch, Rome, and even India. Moving away from the idea of

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Jerusalem as a sacred city, since, according to Orosius, it had been destroyed by an act of divine rage, Rome emerged as the divinely elected site, the caput mundi of the Roman Empire. For Augustine, neither historic Rome nor historic Jerusalem was divinely elected, even though sacred events had occurred in both places. Augustine makes Jerusalem a symbolic city, and Dante follows in this tradition, while in the Monarchia, he follows Orosius to declare Rome, despite its moral corruption and decay in his time, as the world’s political and religious center. The idea of a providential move West (or East, in the case of the crusades or South, as in the example of South Africa), divinely ordained to found new realms, possesses a celebrated history. Heralded in Virgil’s Aeneid when its exiled hero Aeneas is promised new lands and a new bride in Italy, Virgil’s poem features empire and the founding of a new nation as divinely ordained, even while the poet’s dark forebodings about this future empire hover over the entire enterprise of Rome’s foundation narrative. On the cusp of the end of Rome’s temporal rule, and opposing a “heavenly Jerusalem” to a this-worldly empire, Augustine uses Virgil’s poem against the poet to highlight its claims to Rome’s divine election precisely to expose the falsity of the Empire’s drive to conquest, and the gods it patronized. Emanating from the ancient world when kings and emperors claimed divine privileges, the ideas of divine election, providential movements West or outward to “unchristian” or “empty” lands, and claims on the “holy land” with their notions of the inevitable victory of a “chosen people,” echo throughout western history. Still alive today, the idea of providential history follows a trajectory that includes such notions as the divine right of kings, Manifest Destiny, “the Great Trek,” and secular versions of an inevitable march of history as developed in the Communist Manifesto or Social Darwinism and nineteenth century capitalism with its persistent view of American exceptionalism. This idea of American exceptionalism and the chosen, providential destiny for its Anglo-Saxon descendent population, was perhaps most clearly articulated by John L. O’Sullivan’s “Manifest Destiny,” an essay published in 1845, in Democratic Review, where he wrote of the boundless and divinely chosen future for “America”: The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High — the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere — its roof the firmament of the

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star-studded heavens, and its congregation an Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning no man master, but governed by God’s natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood — of “peace and good will amongst men . . ..”

O’Sullivan had founded Democratic Review where he published the major literary figures of the first half of the nineteenth century including Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Hawthorne. In keeping with the views developed under the Enlightenment-informed thinking of these American writers, early in his career, O’Sullivan had advocated for the rights of women and working people, opposed the death penalty, and promoted educational reform. However, he was pro-slavery, and supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. Thus, we can see that his endorsement of “freedom” in the “Manifest Destiny” essay was strictly limited to the white European immigrants who were to inherit this equal brotherhood. The essay continues to spell out the future of this “exceptional” nation: “Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement . . .We must onward to the fulfillment of our mission—to the entire development of the principle of our organization—freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny, and in nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man — the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field. Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity?”5 In South Africa on December 16, 1838, the Boers, the same group who would found the Afrikaner National Party, and eventually establish Apartheid, took a dramatic vow in what they perceived as a life and death struggle against the Zulus. Produced just a year after the original Manifest Destiny statement, the vow offers an unnerving parallel to its claims. Before the Battle of Blood River, the fight that crushed the Zulus and established the Republic of Natal, they promised the following: At this moment we stand before the Holy God of heaven and earth, to make a promise if He will be with us and protect us, and deliver the enemy into our

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hands so that we may triumph over him, that we shall observe the day and the date as an anniversary in each year, and a day of thanksgiving like the Sabbath in His honour; and that we shall enjoin our children that they must take part with us in this for a remembrance even for posterity.6

This vow was repeated from 1838 until 1994 when the Apartheid regime finally fell, every December 16, which became a quasi religious day of nationalist unity. It established the grounds for the fundamental belief in racial separation and social and religious priority of the separatist policies. Adopting a strict binary view that divides the Black from White, Europe from Africa, and Christianity from heathens, when he won the all-White general election based on the apartheid platform in 1948, Dr Daniel Malan, the first (Afrikaner) National Party Prime Minister, explained the unholy matrimony of apartheid and Christianity: The Church believes that God in His wisdom so disposed it that the first White men and women who settled at the foot of the Black Continent were profoundly religious people, imbued with a very real zeal to bring the light of the gospel to the heathen nations of Africa. These first South Africans lit a torch which was carried to the farthest corners of the subcontinent in the course of the last three centuries and whose light now shines upon the greater part of all non-White peoples south of the Equator.7

As noted, the idea of a historical destiny that is preordained is not restricted to the religious domain. One of the most articulate statements of history’s unwavering course forward into an end that would see the triumph of working people is Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Indeed, Marx, one of the first to use the expression “the end of history,” predicted an “epochal” turn when the proletariat would triumph: The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.8

Marx’s argument that the proletariat would inevitably vanquish the bourgeoisie represents an assumption that history is subject to rules and follows an unwavering

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destined pattern. Francis Fukuyama, in his “Afterword” to the second edition of his widely read The End of History and the Last Man, explains that he takes his title precisely from this Marxist notion. He offers an answer to the criticism lodged against his book when it first appeared in 1992, after the 1989 fall of the Soviet regime, an epochal moment for both the Communist and so-called Free world. First, he points out that the term “end of history” is not an expression he invented, for it was first used by Hegel and made popular by Marx. Like Orosius, a millennium and a half before him, Hegel believed that history was “a coherent, evolutionary process” that would follow a “gradual unfolding of human reason.” For Orosius, this gradual unfolding of history had culminated in the Roman Empire. Marx’s theory, which went from the hunter-gatherers to the age of industrialization, led forward-thinking “progressive intellectuals” like himself to believe that the end of history “would terminate in a communist utopia.”9 A dangerous and one might even say pernicious version of the idea of divinely destined history has emerged in the United States in the last three decades. It goes back to earlier Puritan notions of the United States’ destiny as a “City upon a Hill” (1630), a term first used by John Winthrop (1588–1649), governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, to describe the new settlement. Either written before he left England or delivered on board ship, in a sermon titled “A Model of Christian Charity,” the hoped-for new land is called the city on a hill. Quoting Matt. 5.14, when Jesus says “You are the light of the world. A town that stands on a hill cannot be hidden,” Winthrop wrote “wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when tenn of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: the lord make it like that of New England: for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us.”10 Winthrop’s providentialism was typical of Reformation England, where, it has been recently argued, it became “central to the political, medical, and philosophical thought and the literary and historical discourse of the period.”11 This perfect republic of Winthrop’s, however, included repression of religious differences even if the Puritans had fled religious persecution in England. His suppression of Anne Hutchinson (1590–1643) for suspected heretical beliefs, like other acts of religious repression, eventually reinforced the argument for separation of Church and State in the constitution that was still 150 years in the future. This phrase, “A City on the Hill,” spoken by Jesus to his followers, has become a slogan of the Religious Right and some conservatives in the United States. Former President Ronald Reagan, in his farewell address to the nation titled, “We will be a City on a Hill,” adopted the rhetoric of divine destiny for

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the United States, saying in his inimical down-home style that hid some of the worst jingoistic bluster we have witnessed in the history of the country, “You can call it mysticism if you want to, but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.” In this statement, the divine plan and American notions of freedom (i.e. free enterprise capitalist economies) become coterminous. Ronald Reagan’s link between the divine plan and American free enterprise are no more coherently expressed than on the dollar bill itself. On the back side, opposite the American eagle (also the symbol of the Roman Empire), we find, “Annuit coeptis,” based on a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid (“adnue coeptis” [9.625]), spoken as Ascanius, Aeneas’s son, raises his bow to shoot and asks Jupiter to “Bless my daring effort.” Below in the same medallion, we see “Novus ordo seclorum” (new world of ages), which alludes to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue and the new epoch that would emerge with the birth of a child, which referred to Augustus Caesar, but that Lactantius later Christianized to refer to the birth of Jesus, thus eliding the difference between the political and religious realms. Both phrases appear on the Great Seal of the United States, completed in 1782, and in a sense tie the United States to the Roman Empire and specifically to the Christian Roman Empire. More recently, when former President George W. Bush proposed a massive military buildup at West Point in 2002 to counter the presumed threat of terrorism, he stated that “Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place.” This is the same language of the crusaders, making those who do not share this truth outlaws and renegades. As Chalmers Johnson writes Its apparent acceptance of a “clash of civilizations” and of wars to establish a moral truth that is the same in every culture sounds remarkably like jihad, especially given the Bush administration’s ties to Christian fundamentalism. The president even implicitly equated himself with Jesus Christ in repeated statements (notably on September 20, 2001) that those who are not with us are against us, a line clearly meant to echo Matthew 12.30, “He that is not with me is against me.”12

Going back to Winthrop’s idea of a city on the hill, the premises of which were rejected by the American Constitution, for the Religious Right, American exceptionalism as presently articulated holds that the United States possesses a divine role in history. Like Emperor Constantine’s role as Jesus and Moses redivivus, the United States, as understood by millions, is proposed as chosen by God to promulgate its way of life to the world. As Newt Gingrich says in

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his two-and-a-half minute advertisement once again echoing Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5.14) with its title, “A City on the Hill,” to promote the “Spirit of American Exceptionalism,” the United States is a “beacon for the rest of the world,” and we have a “moral obligation to the cause of freedom.”13 Underlying these notions of a divinely supported teleology is the modern conviction about the West’s mission to convert the world to democracy, freedom, and free markets, to be discussed below. But this hegemony rose when the “secularism” and “political realism” that Augustine had proposed in The City of God declined as foundations for a conscience of political resistance. In the Augustinian tradition, religious convictions, that is, one’s relationship to the divinity, as separate from one’s national, gender, social, or familial identity was the conscience that distanced and protected the individual from the State and that served as a corrective to the claims of the State, or the family, or any other social or political unit, outside, of course, the divine mandate to be charitable to those in need. Augustine had argued, as Charles Taylor puts it that “A Christian state could help the Church repress heretics and false cults, but it couldn’t improve its citizens; only the City of God, represented by the Church, could aspire to that.”14 Indeed Augustine had a profound sense of the gap between the claims of the earthly city, even if it pretended to bring God to earth, and the claims of the heavenly city. The idea of heaven on earth would have struck him as perilous ground on which to stake one’s felicity.15 What happened in the Early Modern period, partially due to the Reformation and the CounterReformation, was what Taylor accurately observes as a collapse of the two spheres, the “spiritual” or “sacred” and the “saeculum,” into one. When the king, as in England, assumed the role of the head of the Church, or when the king was deemed divinely chosen, as in France, or when the colonization of the Americas emerged as both an evangelizing and “civilizing” project, the saeculum assumed the erstwhile roles of the Church. This resulted in what Taylor describes as “The Christian life becomes living in the world.”16 He expands on this to observe: But to the extent that churches, and later states with churches, set themselves the goal of mobilizing and organizing and actively bringing about these higher levels of conformity to (what was seen as) the Christian life, this latter came to be codified, laid out in a set of norms. Reform comes to be seen as a serious business, brooking no alternatives. There is no more separate sphere of the “spiritual” where one may go to pursue a life of prayer outside the saeculum; and nor is there the other alternation, between order and anti-order, which Carnival represented. There is just this one relentless order of right thought and action, which must occupy all social and personal space.17

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This overlapping of religion and the State that emerged so forcefully in the Early Modern period has a much longer history, as this study has shown. But, beginning with the forced conversions of the Carolingian period, followed by the crusades and the missionary journeys, themselves followed by the rise of the Inquisition, we see an increasing connection between institutional religion and political ambitions, together representing national consolidation and imperial ventures rather than the practice of charity developed in the New Testament. Although the idea of a descending order of power (from God to royal divinely chosen leader to the people) existed in the Middle Ages, the idea of a “divine right for the sovereign” in the West emerged victoriously in the Early Modern period. This theory is usually attributed to Jean Bodin (1529/30?–1596), a humanist, who rather than entering a religious order, chose to become a jurist. He is today considered one of the major political theorists of the period. Writing from his own experience that was formed in France in the context of the religious wars, in On Sovereignty: Six Books of the Commonwealth, in his chapter on “The True Attributes of Sovereignty,” Bodin states that “because there are none on earth, after God, greater than sovereign princes, whom God establishes as His lieutenants to command the rest of mankind, we must enquire carefully into their estate, that we may respect and revere their majesty in all due obedience, speak and think of them with all due honour. He who contemns his sovereign prince, contemns God whose image he is.”18 Bringing back the ancient Roman imperial idea of the divine ruler, Bodin thus argues that the monarch is equivalent to God on earth. Making an analogy between the prince on earth and God in heaven, he elaborates on this premise, to show that the attributes of the sovereign are unique to that person, to state that “Just as Almighty God cannot create another God equal with Himself, since He is infinite and two infinities cannot co-exist, so the sovereign prince, who is the image of God, cannot make a subject equal with himself without self-destruction.”19 Because of this foundational premise, Bodin rejects the idea that subjects could rebel against the sovereign, and as a consequence, citizens were obliged to be obedient, even if the ruler was a tyrant, because he represented God on earth.20 This structural understanding differs markedly from that elaborated by John of Salisbury (1115– 76) in Policraticus, a work that was widely read even into the sixteenth century. John’s Policraticus, written in the wake of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, an act widely believed to have been instigated by Henry II of England, assumes that the Christian prince must ultimately answer to the pope and then to God, which puts the saeculum in a secondary role to that upheld by religion. Furthermore, John argues that it is the prince’s duty to uphold the law and that a tyrannical

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king, who defies the law, may be assassinated on the grounds that a tyrant was a perversion of the idea of Christian kingship.21 Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) also justifies tyrannicide on similar grounds.22 Bodin’s theory, which in actuality described the emerging political situation at least in England, France, and Spain, was more recently explored by Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), the leading jurist during the Weimar Republic and author of many books including Political Theology, written in the 1920s in Germany. Today considered one of the most important political theorists of the last century, he joined the Nazi party in 1933 and held his position at the University of Berlin as a professor of Law from 1933–1945, when he was detained by the Allies, although he was not charged with any crimes.23 The tract is about “the nature, and thus about the prerogatives, of sovereign political authority as it develops in the West, about its relation to Western Christianity . . .”24 He begins the tract with the line that made him famous, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exceptional case.”25 For Schmitt, “sovereign power precludes it from being subject to law all the time, even in exceptional times.”26 Schmitt recognized Bodin as the critical voice in the concept of sovereignty in the Early Modern period, one who stands at the forefront of the “modern theory of the state.”27 What Schmitt argued, and I would suggest accurately, was that “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the State are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they are transferred from theology to the theory of the State, whereby for example, the omnipotent God became omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.”28 Seeing the beginning of this secularized theology of the State emanating from the seventeenth century when the monarch was identified with God and possessed “a position analogous to that attributed to God in the Cartesian system of the world,” Schmitt sees this fact as the foundation for the king’s right to establish the laws, just as God determines the laws of nature.29 What these kinds of assertions lead to is a complete unraveling of the Augustinian separation of the saeculum from the city of God, not to mention the dispensation and ontological freedom opened to mankind by the Incarnation, as explored in Augustine and Dante’s Commedia. In fact, in order for the modern State to succeed with presuppositions of divine rights of kings, and divine duties for people, the Christian way of life had to be made attainable in this world, that is, realizable in history. The distinction between the secular and religious had to be erased, with the one appropriating the other.30 This is a move that essentially

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sacralizes the State and sidelines New Testament notions of a loving divinity who asks us to love one another. Rather, we are asked to put our faith, hope, and love in the nation. Still, some of the consequences of the dismantling of the distinction between the spheres of the State and of the moral conscience have produced ideals that contribute to the common good. This is precisely Jürgen Habermas’ point that he articulates in Religion and Rationality: “Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love.”31 As Terry Eagleton, who is more famous as a Marxist critic than as a defender of Christianity writes, “The Christian church has tortured and disemboweled in the name of Jesus, gagging dissent and burning its critics alive . . .It supports murderous dictatorships in the name of God, views both criticism and pessimism as unpatriotic, and imagines that being a Christian means maintaining a glazed grin, a substantial bank balance, and a mouthful of pious platitudes.”32 But Eagleton correctly labels this brand of religion ideological belief and not scriptural faith.33 Charles Taylor attributes the narrowing of the gap between the city of God and the earthly saeculum that grew and developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in western societies to the increasing interconnection of ideas of progress, order, and prosperity, themselves ideologically driven, with the Christian ethos. He argues that what led to the sense of civilizational superiority, which grew with Western colonial power, became interwoven with a sense of Christendom as the bearer of this civilization. Missionaries brought Christianity to the non-Western world, often with the sense that they were bringing the bases of future prosperity, progress, order and (sometimes also) democracy and freedom. It became hard for many to answer the question, what is Christian faith about? The salvation of humankind, or the progress wrought by capitalism, technology, democracy? The two tended to blend into one. Even harder did it become to distinguish between salvation and the establishment of good moral order.34

The examples cited here, whether the claims of Manifest Destiny, of the Boer vow, the expectations of the “end of history,” or the hopes and expectations of “the city on the hill” all demonstrate this profound breakdown of the gap between the claims of the State and those of religion or religious conscience. In the United States, a cynical highjacking of religion that appropriates the rhetoric of the divine providence to lend support to the political and economic

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goals contributes to an overall negative attitude toward religion in general and toward Christianity, in particular, among many educated citizens. This political appropriation of Christianity makes it difficult for educated people to grapple with what religion can offer to ameliorate our social and political ills, a position that Eagleton cogently argues in Reason, Faith, and Revolution.35 This has significantly undermined the potential of Christianity as a conscientious force of moral resistance to political and economic policy that can be seen as contradicting or disregarding religious values, particularly those that recommend charity toward the poor, counsel justice for all, and chastise the rich and powerful for abuse of privilege. Looking back over our subject, and the role of canonical works that have had a hold on readers’ attention for two millennia, we can see a pattern in which to read these works according to this secular-religious dichotomy. When the State and religion merged, as in the case of the Davidic dynasty, the Augustan imperial hegemony, or the Constantinian Christian empire, the ideology that explains the destiny of a people and a nation emerges as God’s providential plan for these realms, as we see in the territorial promises to the “chosen people” that becomes the narrative chain that ties together the texts redacted during the Davidic dynasty. As discussed, Virgil’s story of Rome’s rise similarly provides a divine explanation for Rome’s destined history. Both narratives present national histories to support national ideologies that are inseparable from religious convictions. Eusebius and Lactantius, apologists and intellectual architects of the Christian Empire, follow the Virgilian and biblical prompts to lay out the divine purpose of the Roman Empire. Crushing events that challenge these installed narratives and the ideologies that support them, such as the Babylonian exile of the ancient Hebrews or the Christian collapse in the fifth-century sacking of Rome by Alaric, emerge as occasions that force rethinking of the reigning ideologies and national self-conceptualization. The Hebrew Bible, redacted into its canonical form in exile, tells the history of a people from the position of exilic loss and political abjection. The visionary mode of the prophets, who seek to understand this loss, creates the space for a critical distance from political and religious assumptions that questions the proclaimed hegemonic and divinely sanctioned ideology of the saeculum. A similar observation can be made about Augustine, who in the City of God systematically opposes the humility before an ineffable divinity of Psalms to secular realms and their divine destinies to insist that the divine purposes cannot be determined by humans. Orosius, however, Augustine’s younger

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contemporary, defining himself as Christian and Roman, even as Rome was threatened with final dissolution, still hewed to the divine destiny of the Roman Empire, fusing saeculum and religion in an unholy union that has persisted as an ideology even today. In the Monarchia, confronting the political disorder and instability of his times, Dante had looked back nostalgically to the Roman Empire as a model of order he wanted his own age to emulate. In doing so, he had come dangerously close to a Bodin-like theory of the divine authority of his imagined emperor (Monarchia 3.16.16–18). Dante’s apparent confusion of the mission of the emperor with the mission of the divine savior, as noted in Chapter 5, becomes one of his near-heretical ideas that the Commedia attempts to rectify. Adopting the exilic voice of the prophets, in the Commedia, Dante, while never relinquishing his commitment to a restored world order, which is to be achieved by human will and choice, nonetheless, draws a hard line between the world’s disorder and God’s order. As with Augustine, ultimately, Dante sees God’s loving purpose as the salvation of humans, even while he recognized the tragic fact that this salvation cannot be found in any particular history or political order. Eagleton, in examining the anti-God polemic of our own times, insists, citing the tradition upheld by Christian orthodoxy, “For Augustine and Aquinas, love is the precondition of truth: we seek truth because our material bodies manifest an in-built, ineradicable desire for it, a desire which is an expression of our longing for God.”36 Augustine’s insistence on the biblical idea that “the Earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Psalm 94.4–5 [95.4–5]) or Jesus’ remark that “my kingdom does not belong to this world” (John 18.36) raised human individual conscience above the political order, making it possible to challenge the goals and purposes of the State. Augustine argued that the providential intervention into human history of the Christ-event and God’s soteriological plan for humans had changed the conditions whereby humans act in and understand their place and time on earth. In meditating on a divine order that transcended human constructs, Augustine had separated God from particular histories, dismantled the idea of the providential history of nations, and challenged the Roman Empire in terms that question the ethical foundation of all imperial ventures. But for Augustine, the repudiation of empire did not deny the claims of the saeculum. Just the reverse, for to achieve the city of God, Christians were enjoined to love one another and provide for those in need. Like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, whose Book 3 of the Summa Contra Gentiles offers an extended exploration of the nature of divine providence, in the ultimate vision, Dante’s poem repudiates

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pleasures of the flesh, worldly honors and glory, worldly power, wealth, even moral virtues and prudence, and art itself to reveal how human felicity, the divine gift of a providential incarnation, ultimately consists in the pleasure of contemplating God. But, nonetheless, Dante, like Augustine, was also committed to the saeculum, the dirge that expresses his longing for political and moral justice, the result of bitter personal experience, a profound engagement with the Hebrew prophets, and the message of love he found in the New Testament.

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Notes Introduction 1 A. H. Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For this theory of history, see R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 49–50; Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. and intro. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 81–97; Hayden White, “Getting out of History: Jameson’s Redemption of Narrative,” and “The Metaphysics of Narrativity: Time and Symbol in Ricoeur’s Philosophy of History,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 142–68; 169–84. 2 Lactantius, De Mortibus persecutorum, SC 39, 2 vols, ed. J. Moreau (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1954). 3 Eusebius, Histoire Écclesiastique, SC 31, 41, 55, and 73, texte Grec and trans. Gustave Bardy (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1952–1960); Eusebius, Vita Constantini, PG 20, 1.28, Col. 943–4. Translations are from Eusebius: Life of Constantine, intro., trans., and comm. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 81. 4 Fredric Jameson writes, “epochality . . . by way of which we defend the historical meaning and significance of the present moment and the present age against all claims of the past and future,” in “ ‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History,’ ’’ in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 90. 5 Written between 1936 and 1940, Collingwood, The Idea of History, 49–50. 6 For works on Dante’s idea of Rome, his politics, and the roles of pope and emperor, see Bruno Nardi, “Il concetto dell’Impero nello svolgimento del pensiero dantesco,” in Saggi di filosofia dantesca (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1967; lst edition 1930), 215–75; Theodore Silverstein, “On the Genesis of De Monarchia, II, v,” in Dante in America: The First Two Centuries, ed. A. Bartlett Giamatti (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983, 187–218; orig. pub. Speculum XIII [1938], 326–49); Paul Renucci, Dante disciple et juge du monde gréco-latin (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1954), 311–50; Alessandro

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Notes Passerin d’Entrèves, Dante politico e altri saggi (Rome: Einaudi, 1955); Michele Maccarone, “Il terzo libro della Monarchia,” Studi Danteschi 33 (1955), 5–142; Michele Barbi, Problemi Fondamentali Per un Nuovo Commento della Divina Commedia (Florence: Sansoni, 1955), 49–68; Charles T. Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957); Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Bruno Nardi, “Intorno ad una nuova interpretazione del terzo libro della Monarchia dantesca,” in Dal “Convivio” alla “Commedia”: Sei saggi danteschi (Rome: Nella Sede dell’ Istituto, 1960), 151–313; Uberto Limentani, “Dante’s Political Thought,” in The Mind of Dante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 113–37; Antonio de Angelis, Il concetto d’ Imperium e la comunità soprannazionale in Dante (Milan: Giuffrè, 1965); Francesco Mazzoni, “Teoresi e prassi in Dante politico,” intro. to Dante Alighieri,Monarchia, Epistole politiche (Turin: ERI, 1966), 9–111; Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 66–106; Page DuBois, “Virgil: The Path from East to West” and “Dante: The Upward Spiral,” in History, Rhetorical Description and the Epic: From Homer to Spenser (London: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 28–51, 52–70; Joan M. Ferrante, The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Jeffrey T. Schnapp, The Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante’s Paradise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Timothy G. Sistrunk, “Obligations of the Emperor as the Reverent Son in Dante’s Monarchia,” Dante Studies 105 (1987): 95–112; Giuseppe Di Scipio, “Dante and Politics,” in The Divine Comedy and the Encyclopedia of Arts and Sciences, ed. Giuseppe Di Scipio and Aldo Scaglione (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1988), 267–84; Peter Armour, Dante’s Griffin and the History of the World: A Study of the Earthly Paradise (Purgatorio, cantos xxix–xxxiii) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Shaw, “Introduction,” Dante Monarchia, xiii–xli; John A. Scott, Dante’s Political Purgatory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

7 The notion of “Taken for granted” comes from Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13. For the idea of the “end of history,” see Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso, 1992), 279–375, the chapter titled, “The Ends of History,” for an assessment of the various arguments about this notion in the modern and postmodern era. 8 Lucanus, De Bello Civili, ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1988). 9 Macrobius, Commentarium in Somnium Scipionis, ed. J. Willis (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1970). For Book 1, I use, Macrobius, Commentaire au Songe de Scipion,

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Livre 1, ed., trans. from Latin and commented Mireille Armisen-Marchetti (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001); translations are from Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, ed. and trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). 10 Taylor, A Secular Age, 13. 11 My overall indebtedness to the hermeneutical theories of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, l986) is evident throughout; likewise Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 12 For example, see Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours: Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), available in English as “The Discourse of Language,” in the appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972); Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Michel de Certeau, “History: Science and Fiction,” trans. Brian Massumi, with foreword Wlad Godzich in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 199–221; Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, trans. from French Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997); Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 13 For the notion of “authority,” that I apply here, see Albert Russell Ascoli, “Introduction,” Dante and the Making of the Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 5 (3–64). The first major work to deal with medieval ideas of authorship and reference to authorities is A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). 14 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 256. 15 Ascoli, Dante and the Making of the Modern Author, 229–73. 16 Virgil in the Middle Ages, see Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medioevo I and II (Florence: La Nuova Editrice, 1981; first publ. 1895). See also, Charles Martindale, “Introduction: ‘The classic of all Europe,’ ’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–18. 17 Henri-Irénée Marrou, Saint Augustin et la Fin de la Culture Antique (Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard, 1958; rept. 1968), writes that Augustine and Orosius

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Notes are the most important intellectual figures of the Middle Ages. See also Santo Mazzarino, The End of the Ancient World, trans. from Italian George Holmes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 58–76. The following books and articles all deal with the contribution of Augustine to medieval and early Renaissance thought: Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de Saint Augustin (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1950); Pierre Courcelle, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1963); John Freccero, Dante: the Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert; Pierre de Nolhac, “Les pères de l’eglise et les auteurs modernes chez Pétrarque,” in Pétrarque et l’Humanisme II (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion Éditeur, 1907), 189–237; Pietro Paolo Gerosa, Umanesimo Cristiano del Petrarca: Influenza Agostiniana Attinenze Medievali (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1966); Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1996); Charles Bené, Érasme et Saint Augustin ou l’influence de Saint Augustin sur l’humanisme d’Érasme (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1969); John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

18 Isidore of Seville, Etimologías, Edición Bilingüe, 2 vols, ed. and trans. José Oroz Reta, Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz and Manuel Marcus Casquero (Madrid: Editorial Católica, 1982). 19 Rhabanus Maurus, De Universo, PL 111. Cols. 1–614. 20 Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Quadruplex sive Speculum Maius, 1624 Baltazaris Belleri (Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1965). 21 The main argument of the chapter on Orosius in Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity, 35–99. 22 “. . . the period 1250 to 1450 was seminal for the values and politics of the modern world. . .” Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), ix. 23 White, Metahistory. 24 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, xii; again, see also Clark “Texts and Contexts,” 130–55 and “History, Theory and Premodern Texts,” 156–85, for application of postmodern theories to premodern texts and the issue of types of discourse. 25 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. from French Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), vol 1, 92. 26 Brian Stock, “History, Literature, Textuality,” in Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 18.

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27 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 179. 28 Michel de Certeau, “History: Science and Fiction,” Heterologies, 200. 29 Ibid, 200–5. 30 For a standard study of this and its relevance to the development of Christianity, see Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). See especially, the chapter “Divine Necessity and Human History,” 456–516. 31 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 219. 32 See Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982). 33 Collingwood, The Idea of History, 46. 34 See Maurizio Bettini, “Mythos/Fabula” in The Novel 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 228. 35 See Bernard Williams, “What Was Wrong with Minos? Thucydides and Historical Time,” Representations 74 (Spring, 2001): 1–18. This essay reappears in Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 149–71; see also Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 469–74. 36 Williams, “What Was Wrong with Minos?” Representations 74, 1. 37 Ibid, 2–3. 38 Ibid, 10–11. 39 Ibid, 9. 40 For a response to William’s position, see Richard Rorty, “To the Sunlit Uplands,” a review of Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, London Review of Books (October 31, 2002), 13–15; also, see White, The Content of the Form, for several essays which represent the rhetorical aspect of historiography with which Williams argues. 41 Cicero, De Oratore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 2.55. 42 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and intro. H.E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 2.5.19. 43 See Harald Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics 1: Testimonia (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1967), 1.225–44; Paul C. Burns, “Augustine’s Use of Sallust in the City of God: The Role of the Grammatical Tradition,” in History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine’s City of God, ed. Mark Vessey, Karla Pollman, and Allan D. Fitzgerald, Proceedings of a colloquium held at Green College, University of British Columbia, September, 1997 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999), 105–14.

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44 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Anchor Books, 1957), 35. 45 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, 1.2. 46 An important point that Collingwood makes to distinguish between Roman and Hebrew, on the one hand, and Christian historiographical innovation on the other. See The Idea of History, 50. 47 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative I, 266. 48 Discussing the literary history of Rome, this is the principal thesis of Michel Serres, Rome: Le Livre des fondations (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1983). 49 See Clark, “Texts and Contexts,” History, Theory, Text, 130–55. 50 This observation is indebted to George Steiner, “Preface,” After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1992), xii. 51 John Hollander’s theory of “echoing” in literature, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California, l981) has been adopted by Richard B. Hayes for biblical interpretation in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, l989). 52 “Swerve” or clynamen, taken from Lucretius, is a term that Harold Bloom uses in his now canonical study of reception, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1997), 19–45. 53 Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, discusses “self-purgation” as a type of askesis, which he takes from the pre-Socratics like Empedocles, 115–36. 54 The Book of J, trans. David Rosenberg and Interpreted Harold Bloom (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, l990), 14. 55 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 273. 56 See Charles Martindale, “Introduction,” referring to Adam Parry’s essay, “The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid,” in The Cambridge Companion to Vigil, 11 ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11. 57 Stock, Augustine the Reader, 54. 58 See Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), who argues that Paul is addressing “over-literal understanding” but that the text makes the dichotomy between “Israel according to the flesh,” that is “the literal, concrete, historical Israel,” and “Israel according to the spirit,” that is, the allegorical, spiritual, ontological, and ideal Israel—ultimately the Church, 75. 59 Stock, Augustine the Reader, 167, passim.

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60 See Michael Fishbane, The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, l989); Jacob Neusner, Canon and Connection: Intertextuality in Judaism (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, l987) 6–13, and D. A. Carson and H. G. M. Williamson, eds, It is Written: Scripture Citing Scripture Essays in Honour of Barnabus Lindars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l988). 61 The Garments of Torah, 3–18. 62 Stock, Augustine the Reader, 31. 63 See Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Meridian Books, 1973), 11–76; V. Stanley Benfell, The Biblical Dante (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 64 See Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. from German Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 68–73. 65 Ascoli, “The author of the Commedia,” Chapter 7 in Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 301–405. 66 Peter Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments: Essays in the Scriptural Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 41. 67 Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 125–42. 68 This is the central contribution of John Freccero’s series of essays edited in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. See also Mazzotta, Dante: Poet of the Desert. 69 A. C. Mastrobuono, Essays on Dante’s Philosophy of History (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1979), 11. 70 For a complete discussion of Dante’s encyclopedic imagination, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Chapter 1 1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 2 “The Ends of History,” in Anderson, A Zone of Engagement, 279, 279–375. 3 Jameson, “ ‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History,’ ’’ in The Cultural Turn, 87. 4 Jameson, 90. Jameson links the work of Alexandre Kojève with Fukuyama’s as reflecting the same underlying convictions.

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5 Whether or not the Aeneid or Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita are actually finished is not at issue here. They are discussed as completed in the sense that they have been historically received as they stand. 6 See Johan Chydenius, “The Typological Problem in Dante: A Study in the History of Medieval Ideas,” Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum XXV.1 (1958), 11–13. 7 See Fishbane, The Garments of Torah, 3–18. 8 For an overview of these approaches in the Bible, Church fathers, liturgy, and historical texts up to Dante, see Chydenius, “The Typological Problem in Dante: A Study in the History of Medieval Ideas,” 1–159. 9 Fishbane, The Garments of Torah, 3–18. 10 Chydenius, “The Typological Problem in Dante: A Study in the History of Medieval Ideas,” 51–8. 11 For the importance of historic context in the reception and understanding of texts that form a canon, see Neusner, Canon and Connection; Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Brenda Deen Schildgen, Power and Prejudice: The Reception of the Gospel of Mark (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). 12 In other words, following Brevard S. Childs, Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985). 13 For this notion of the god of battles, see the first two chapters of Peter Partner, God of Battles: Holy Wars of Christianity and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), which lay out the biblical and ancient Near Eastern foundations for divine intervention into the temporal domain (1–30). 14 For a discussion of these texts of promise, see Robert L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Gerhard von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, trans. E.W.T. Dicken (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966); W.D. Davies, Chapter II, “The Land in the Hexateuch” and III, “The Land in the Prophets,” in The Gospel and the Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 15–35 and 36–48. 15 Claus Westermann, The Promises to the Fathers: Studies on the Patriarchal Narratives, trans. David E. Green (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 131. 16 Gen. 12.7; 13.14–15; 13.17; 15.7–21; 17.8; 24.7; 26.3, 4; 28.4, 13; 35.12; 48.4; 50.24. Exo. 13.5, 11; 32.13; 33.1; Num. 11.12; 14.16, 23; 32.11; Deut. 1.8, 35; 4.31; 6.10, 18, 23; and 13 other passages. See Watermann, The Promises to the Fathers, 143. 17 See R. E. Clements, Abraham and David. Genesis XV and its Meaning for Israelite Tradition (London: SCM Press, 1967), 15.

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18 See Davies, The Gospel and the Land, 15–35; Clements, Abraham and David, 23. 19 Davies, Gospel and the Land, 18. 20 Davies, Gospel and the Land, 25. 21 Norman K. Gottwald, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 310–25. 22 Ibid., 82–83. 23 Chydenius, Typological Problem in Dante, 12–13. 24 See Davies, Gospel and the Land, 19, and Deut. 1.8, 34.4; 11.8–9; 10.11; 1.35; 30.5; 7.13. 25 Davies, Gospel and the Land, 45. 26 Davies, Gospel and the Land, 43. 27 Davies, Gospel and the Land, 35. 28 M. Tullius Cicero, De Re Publica, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (London: William Heinemann, 1928), 12–285. 29 Confessions, 3.4. 30 See Black, Political Thought in Europe, 19–20. 31 For widespread use of Cicero’s De Officiis and De Re Publica, see Black, Political Thought in Europe, 9; for echoes of Macrobius in Dante, see Guy P. Raffa, Divine Dialectic. Dante’s Incarnational Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 155–6. 32 For Macrobius’ neo-platonism, see Armisen-Marchetti “Introduction,” to Macrobius, Commentaire au Songe de Scipion, xviii–xix; see Stahl, “Introduction,” Macrobius, Commentarium, 32–39; Pierre Courcelle, “L’Hellénisme Paien: Macrobe,” Les Lettres Grecques en Occident. De Macrobe à Cassiodore (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1943), 3–36; and the English version, Pierre Courcelle, “Pagan Hellenism. Macrobius,” Late Latin Writers and Their Greek Sources, trans. Harry E. Wedeck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 13–47; Jacques Flamant, Macrobe et le néo-platonisme latin, à la fin du IVe siècle (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977). 33 Armisen-Marchetti “Introduction,” to Macrobius, Commentaire au Songe de Scipion, Livre 1, lxvi–lxxii; P. D. A. Harvey, “Medieval Maps. An Introduction,” in The History of Cartography 1. Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 283–5; David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in The History of Cartography, 286–370. 34 For Macrobius’ importance to geography, see Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in The History of Cartography, 286–370.

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35 Cicero, “Somn. Scip.,” in De Re Publica, 6.16, 268. 36 Cicero, “Somn. Scip.,” 6.3; quoted in Macrobius, Commentary, 3.7. 37 “te sedem etiam nunc hominum ac domum contemplari; quae si tibi parva, ut est, ita videtur, haec caelestia semper spectato, illa humana contemnito. tu enim quam celebritatem sermonis hominum aut quam expetendam consequi gloriam potes?” (Cicero, “Somn. Scip.,” 6.1; Macrobius, Commentary, 2.11). 38 “. . . Gangen transnare vel transcendere Caucasum Romani nominis fama non valuit” (Macrobius, Commentary, 2.10.3). 39 “Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris/Italiam fato profugus Lavinaque venit/litora” (Aen. 1.1–2). 40 “multosque per annos/ errabant, acti fatis, maria omnia circum./ tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem” (Aen. 1.31–3). 41 As David Quint, writes in Epic and Empire. Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), “Narrative itself thus becomes ideologically charged, the formal cause and consequence of that Western male rationality and historical identity that epic ascribes to the imperial victors,” 45. 42 “Parce metu, Cytherea; manent immota tuorum fata tibi; cernes urbem et promissa Lavini moenia, sublimemque feres ad sidera caeli magnanimum Aenean; neque me sententia vertit. hic tibi, fabor enim, quando haec te cura remordet, longius et volvens fatorum arcana movebo, bellum ingens geret Italia populosque ferocis contundet moresque viris et moenia ponet, tertia dum Latio regnantem viderit aestas, ternaque transierunt Rutulis hiberna subactis. at puer Ascanius, cui nunc cognomen Iulo additur, Ilus erat, dum res stetit Ilia regno . . .” (Aen. 1.257–68). 43 “. . . non haec sine numine divum/ eveniunt . . .illic res laetae regnumque et regia coniunx/ parta tibi. lacrimas dilectae pelle Creusae” (Aen. 2.777–8; 783–4). 44 “sed fore qui gravidam imperiis belloque frementem/ Italiam regeret, genus alto a sanguine Teucri/ proderet, ac totum sub leges mitteret orbem” (Aen. 4.229–31). 45 “hic vir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis, Augustus Caesar, Divi genus, aurea condet saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva Saturno quondam . . .” (Aen. 6.791–4).

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46 “Nunc age, Dardaniam prolem quae deinde sequatur gloria, qui maneant Itala de gente nepotes, inlustris animas nostrumque in nomen ituras, expediam dictis, et te tua fata docebo” (Aen. 6.756–9). 47 “. . . incedunt victae longo ordine gentes, quam variae linguis, habitu tam vestis et armis. hic Nomadum genus et discinctos Mulciber Afros, hic Lelegas Carasque sagittiferosque Gelonos finxerat; Euphrates ibat iam mollior undis; extremique hominum Morini, Rhenusque bicornis; indomitique Dahae, et pontem indignatus Araxes” (Aen. 8.722–8). 48 “. . . hic Caesar et omnis Iuli progenies, magnum caeli ventura sub axem. hic vir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis, Augustus Caesar, divi genus, aurea condet saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva Saturno quondam, super et Garamantas et Indos proferet imperium . . . iacet extra sidera tellus, extra anni solisque vias, ubi caelifer Atlas axem umero torquet stellis ardentibus aptum” (Caesar, and all of Iulus’ offspring, destined To make their way to heaven’s splendid heights. Here is the man so often promised you, Augustus Caesar, a god’s son, and bringer Of a new age of gold to Saturn’s old realm Of Latium. He will take our rule past India, Past Garamantia, past the solar pathway That marks the year, where Atlas hefts the sky And turns the high vault set with burning stars [Aen. 6.789–97]). An essay which treats Virgil’s exotic images of “India” and “Indians” is J. André, “Virgile et les Indiens,” Revue des Études Latines 27 (1949), 157–63. 49 In examining how patronage in fact worked during the Augustan period, Peter White has questioned the idea that Virgil and other Augustan poets were actually responding to the emperor’s poetic-political prompts. See Promised Verse. Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). My argument is rather that the poetry both reflects and promotes political themes that the poets do not always challenge.

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50 “ne, pueri, ne tanta animis adsuescite bella neu patriae validas in viscera vertite viris; tuque prior, tu parce, genus qui ducis Olympo, proice tela manu, sanguis meus!” (Aen. 6.832–5). 51 “tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento, haec tibi erunt artes, pacique imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos” (Aen. 6.851–3). 52 See Gian Biagio Conte, “Virgil’s Aeneid. Toward an Interpretation,” in The Rhetoric of Imitation. Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Poets, trans. Italian ed. Charles Segal (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 163. 53 Adam Parry, “The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid,” in S. Commager, ed. Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1966), 107–23. 54 DuBois, “Virgil. The Path from East to West,” in History, Rhetorical Description and the Epic, makes this point, 50–1. 55 For a thorough analysis of how Augustine uses Virgil, see Sabine MacCormack, The Shadows of Poetry. Vergil in the Mind of Augustine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 56 “Hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre ac frugiferum, omnis te exempli documenta in inlustri posita monumento intueri; inde tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu, foedum exitu, quod vites” (Ab Urbe Condita Praef. 10). 57 “Sed debebatur, ut opinor, fatis tantae origo urbis maximique secundum deorum opes imperii principium” (Ab Urbe Condita 1.4.1). 58 “post bellum Actiacum ab imperatore Caesare Augusto pace terra marique parta” (Ab Urbe Condita 1.19.3–4). 59 See Serres, Rome: Le Livre des fondations, 162. 60 See Valerie M. Warrior, “Introduction,” Livy, The History of Rome: Books 1–5, trans, intro. and notes Valerie M. Warrior (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2006), x. (i–xxvi). 61 “ne rex vicinus imperio sit Romano, ne gens bello nobilis arma habeat” (Ab Urbe Condita 42.52.15). 62 “Tum maximum in terris Macedonum regnum nomenque; inde morte Alexandri distractam in multa regna, dum ad se quisque opes rapiunt, laceratis viribus a summo culmine fortunae ad ultimum finem centum quinquaginta annos stetit” (Ab Urbe Condita 45.9.56). 63 Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993), a study of European literature in the colonial period, makes this point about imperialist ideology, 5–12.

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64 “Mille acies graviores quam Macedonum atque Alexandri avertit avertetque, modo sit perpetuus huius qua vivimus pacis amor et civilis cura concordiae” (Ab Urbe Condita 9.19.17). 65 Warrior writes, “Despite allusions to the greatness of Rome, the overall mood of the Preface is one of regret and pessimism that is alleviated only by the brief conclusion in which Livy prays for good omens and the blessing of success as he begins his great enterprise” “Introduction,” The History of Rome, xviii. 66 “Sunt nobis nulla profecto/Numina. cum caeco rapiantur saecula casu,/ Mentimur regnare Iovem” (Pharsalia 7.444–47). 67 See Pharsalia school-book variety manuscripts like B. A. V. Vat. Lat. 1620 (c. XIV) and 1621 (c. XII–XIII). 68 Others who have taken up these tensions in the Roman poets include Michael C.J. Putnam, The Poetry of the Aeneid: Four Studies in Imaginative Unity and Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible. A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); also see Philip Hardie, “Virgil and Tragedy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, 312–26; see W. R. Johnson, “The Problem of the Counter-Classical Sensibility and Its Critics,” California Studies in Classical Antiquity 3 (1970), 123–51; Charles Segal, “Myth and Philosophy in the Metamorphoses. Ovid’s Augustanism and the Augustan Conclusion of Book XV,” American Journal of Philology 90 (1969), 257–92; G. K. Galinsky, Ovid’s Metamorphosis. An Introduction to the Basic Aspects (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); DuBois, “Vergil. The Path from East to West,” in History, Rhetorical Description and the Epic, 28–51; Quint, “Epic and Empire. Versions of Actium,” and “Repetition and Ideology in the Aeneid,” in Epic and Empire, 21–96; W. R. Johnson, Momentary Monsters. Lucan and His Heroes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 69 Quint, Epic and Empire, 52. 70 For the locus classicus of this argument, see Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. John Marsha (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 275–80. 71 See Chapter 1 in Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1–21, for the complex nature of Jewish and Christian identities in the first four centuries of the Christian dispensation. 72 Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 194. 73 Josephus in 9 volumes with English trans. H. St J. Thackeray, The Jewish War, vols 2–3 and Jewish Antiquities, vols 4–9 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

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74 Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). See also Alan Segal, Paul the Convert: the Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Krister Stendahl, “Call Rather than Conversion,” in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 7–13; Brenda Deen Schildgen, “Conversion: ’ επιστροϕε and μετανοια in the Gospel of Mark,” Journal of Jewish History 23 (2009), 1–16. 75 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 52. 76 Especially, see E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1977). 77 Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity, 165–6. 78 “et dixit eis quoniam sic scriptum est et sic oportebat Christum pati et resurgere a mortuis die tertia et praedicari in nomine eius paenitentiam et remissionem peccatorum in omnes gentes incipientibus ab Hierosolyma” (Luke 24.46–7). 79 “In veritate conperi quoniam non est personarum acceptor Deus sed in omni gente qui timet eum et operatur iustitiam acceptus est illi” (Acts 10.34–5). 80 James L. Resseguie, The Revelation of John: A Narrative Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2009), 221. 81 David E. Aune, “Apocalypse Renewed: An Intertextual Reading of the Apocalypse of John,” in The Reality of Apocalypse: Rhetoric and Politics in the Book of Revelation, ed. David L. Barr (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 60–2 (43–70). 82 For example, see Theissen, “Social Integration and Sacramental Activity. An Analysis of I Cor. 11.17–34,” in The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity, 145–74; Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians. The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 83 The thesis of John H. Elliott’s Home for the Homeless. A Sociological Exegesis of I Peter, Its Situation and Strategy (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981). 84 “omnis qui credit in illum non confundetur/ non enim est distinctio Iudaei et Graeci/ nam idem Dominus omnium/ dives in omnes qui invocant illum/ omnis enim quicumque invocaverit/nomen Domini salvus erit” (Romans 10.11–13 [12]). Opinions on dating Paul’s letters to the Romans and Corinthians vary between 48 CE and 58 CE. 85 “nescitis quia templum Dei estis/ et Spiritus Dei habitat in vobis/ si quis autem templum Dei violaverit disperdet illum Deus/ templum enim Dei sanctum est quod estis vos” (1 Cor. 3.16–17).

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86 Raymond Brown glosses this passage as follows: “Jesus is speaking of the eschatological replacement of temporal institutions like the Temple . . . In 2:21, it was Jesus himself who was to take the place of the temple, and here it is the Spirit given by Jesus that is to animate the worship that replaces worship at the temple.” The Gospel According to John, intro., trans. and notes Raymond E. Brown (New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1966), 180. 87 “et templum non vidi in ea Dominus enim Deus omnipotens templum illius est et agnus” (Apocalypse of John 21.22). 88 H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops. The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 422.

Chapter 2 1 The point is made by Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity, 40–3. 2 Eugenio Corsini, Introduzione alle “Storie” di Orosio (Turin: G. Giappichelli, 1968), 89. 3 See “Commento: Libro Secondo,” in Orosio, Le Storie Contro I Pagani 1, 391. 4 See “Commento: Libro Secondo,” in Orosio, Le Storie Contro I Pagani 1, 393; Jerome, Commentarium in Danielem, CCSL 75A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1964); Hippolytus of Rome, Commentarium in Danielem. French and Greek. Commentaire sur Daniel, intro. Gustave Bardy, ed. and trans. Maurice Lefèvre (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1947). 5 “Dicturus igitur ab orbe condito usque ad Urbem conditam, dehinc usque ad Caesaris principatum nativitatemque Christi ex quo sub potestate Urbis orbis mansit imperium, vel etiam usque ad dies nostros . . .” (Hist. 1.1.14). 6 This occurred through the signing of the so-called Edict of Milan, based on Lactantius, De Mortibus persecutorum, 48.1, ff., and Eusebius, Histoire Écclesiastique SC 55 (10.5.4, ff.), which refers to the meeting of emperors at Milan to rescind the persecution of Christians. But, in fact, numerous measures had already been taken to end the persecutions prior to the date of this supposed Edict (313 C.E.). See Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 318, and Norman H. Baynes, Constantine the Great and the Christian Church (London: Proceedings of the British Academy, Humphrey Milford, 1929), 351–7; see also Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, The Making of a Christian Empire: Lactantius and Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 122–3.

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7 For a thorough study of the relationship between Orosius and Eusebius and Lactantius, see Antonio Polichetti, Le “Historiae” di Orosio e la “Storiografia Ecclestiastica” occidentale (311–417 D.C.) (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000). Eusebius came to Orosius through the translation of Rufinus. Also, see Corsini, Introduzione alle “Storie” di Orosio, 97–8. Hervé Inglebert, Les Romains Chrétiens face à l’histoire de Rome: Histoire, christianisme et romanités en occident dans l’Antiquité tardive (IIIe-Ve siècles) (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1996), also treats the indebtedness of Orosius’ History to Eusebius, which he calls the renewal of Latin “eusebianism” (505–89). 8 Histoire Écclesiastique, SC 31, 1.5.2. 9 “Postquam redemptor mundi, Dominus Iesus Christus, venit in terras et Caesaris censu civis Romanus adscriptus est, . . . annos clausae belli portae beatissima pacis tranquillitate cohibentur” (Hist. 7.3.4). 10 For this theory of history, see Ricoeur, History and Truth, 81–97; Hayden White, “Getting out of History: Jameson’s Redemption of Narrative,” and “The Metaphysics of Narrativity: Time and Symbol in Ricoeur’s Philosophy of History,” in The Content of the Form, 142–68; 169–84. 11 See Inglebert, Les Romains Chrétiens, 57–8. 12 See Chapters 2 and 3 in Black, Political Thought in Europe, 42–84; 85–116; Shaw, “Introduction” to Dante Monarchia. 13 Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 269–73. See also Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, who argues that Christianity was a “respectable institution” at the time of Constantine’s conversion (21, 49–54, 144–45). Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, estimates the population of Christians at 6 million, about 10 percent of the entire population of the Empire (73, 109–10). 14 Eusebius, Vita Constantini, PG 20, 1.28. col. 943–4. Eusebius: Life of Constantine, 81. 15 DePalma Digeser, The Making of a Christian Empire, 13. 16 Ibid., 89. 17 “Unde apparet illum regem fuisse terrenum: quod alibi apertius declarat: ‘aurea condet Saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva Saturno quondam,’ ’’ Institutions Divines, SC 326, ed. Pierre Monat (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1986), 1.13.13, quoting from Aen. 6.792–4. 18 Pierre Courcelle, “Les Exégèses Chrétiennes de la Quatrième Églogue,” Revue des Études Anciennes 59:3–4 (1957), 294–319.

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19 Institutions Divines 7.24.7, quoting Virgil, Eclogue 4.38–41, 28–30, 42–5 (Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aen. 1–6 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999]). 20 Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aen. 1–6, Eclogue 4.8–17. Also, Isa. 9.6–7 and 11.1-5 elaborated further on this messianic expectation. 21 Eusebius, Histoire Écclesiastique, SC 31, 1.5.2. 22 Eusebius, Laudibus Constantini, PG 20, Chapters 11–18 (col. 1375–1440); see also Johannes Van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study of Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of His Doctrine of the Two Cities (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), 154–7. 23 Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 363–4. 24 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century A.D.,” in The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. Arnaldo Momigliano (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 79–99. 25 See Lippold, “Introduzione,” Orosio, Le Storie Contro I Pagani, XLI–XLII. 26 Chydenius, “The Typological Problem in Dante,” 1–159. 27 Letter 166, Saint Augustine Letters vol 4 (165–203), trans. Sister Wilfrid Parsons, S.N.D. (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1955), 7 (6–31). Also see E. D. Hunt, “Pelagius, Orosius, and St. Stephen,” Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire AD 312–460 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 203–20, for Orosius’ history and relationship to Augustine. Hunt hypothesizes that Orosius would certainly have made a pilgrimage to the holy sites (210–11). 28 Lippold, “Introduzione,” Orosio, Le Storie, XL–XLII. 29 See Benoit Lacroix, Orose et ses idées (Paris: l’Institut d’études médiévales, 1965), 16, 61. 30 See Corsini, Introduzione alle “Storie” di Orosio, 85–134; Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity, 35–99. 31 Lacroix, Orose et ses idées, 16–23. 32 Lippold, “Introduzione,” Orosio, Le Storie, XLIII–XLV. 33 King Alfred, Orosius, ed. Henry Sweet in Early English Text Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1959, rept. 1883). 34 Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History in 3 vols trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), and for the use of Orosius, see Franz Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968), 80–1. 35 See Giovanni Guerini da Lanciza, Paolo Orosio tradotto di latino volgare (Toscolano: P.A. Paganinum, 1520). 36 Corsini, Introduzione alle “Storie,” 85.

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37 See Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 83–98. 38 See Jacques Le Goff, St. Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 39 Dante’s adoption of this theory in Monarchia and the Commedia as well as his indebtedness to Orosius were laid out in detail by Paget Toynbee, “Dante’s Obligations to the Ormista (The Historiae Adversum Paganos of Orosius),” in Dante Studies and Researches (London: Methuen and Co., 1902), 121–36. Paget Toynbee was convinced that “Quell’ avvocato dei tempi cristiani” (Par. 10.119) was Orosius. 40 For Dante’s indebtedness to Orosius on the centrality of Rome, providential history, and the story of Rome and the other Empires, see Nardi, “Il concetto dell’ Impero nello svolgimento del pensiero dantesco,” 215–75; Nardi, “Intorno ad una nuova interpretazione del terzo libro della Monarchia dantesca,” 151–313; d’Entrèves, Dante as a Political Thinker; Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies; Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome; Limentani, The Mind of Dante, 113–37; Mazzoni, Dante Alighieri, Monarchia, Epistole politiche, 9–111; Charles T. Davis, “Dante’s Vision of History,” in Dante’s Italy and Other Essays (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 23–41; Ferrante, The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy; Armour, Dante’s Griffin and the History of the World; Scott, Dante’s Political Purgatory; Shaw, “Introduction,” Dante Monarchia. 41 Beryl Smalley characterized the historians of the fourteenth century as more conservative than the humanists and artists for whom the gap between the present and the ancient past was perceived as a rift which they reflected in their works by the use of perspective. This difference in focus led Smalley to conclude about the historical writing of the period that “In the fourteenth century, the sense of continuity snapped.” Historians in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1974), 192–3. 42 See Annexe 4, in Orose, Histoires (Contre les Païens), bilingual edition in 3 vols, ed. and trans. from Latin Marie-Pierre Arnaud-Lindet (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1990–91), for a list of Orosius’ sources, 268–99. Also see Lippold “Introduzione,” Storie Contro, XXXIII–XXXIX for the range of Orosius’ sources; see Polichetti, “Historiae” di Orosio, 7–8. 43 Corsini, Introduzione alle “Storie,” 86. 44 Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity. 45 Ibid., 97–9. 46 The Geography of Strabo, 8 vols, trans. Horace Leonard Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949); Pliny, Natural History, 10 vols. trans.

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H. Rackham et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938–63), 2.1. “Romancentric,” as one would expect of a first-century Roman, in Books 3–4 Pliny turns to the “sites, races, seas, towns, harbours, mountains, rivers, dimensions, present and past populations” of Europe, setting Pliny’s center of the world as the norm from which to start—Eastern Spain, Southern France, and Italy—and then widening outwards until he comes to the peripheries. Books 5–6 turn to the Middle East, Africa, and India, which he connects according to current geographical theory and from which he makes a vast list to characterize the habits, features, or patterns of behavior of the plants, animals, stones, and people of Asia. 47 Harvey, “Medieval Maps: An Introduction,” in The History of Cartography I, 283–5; Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in The History of Cartography I, 286–370, which includes a chronological list of major medieval mappaemundi, CE 300–1460 (359–68) and an excellent bibliography of medieval mapmaking (369–70). 48 See Yves Janvier, La géographie d’Orose (Paris: Société d’Édition “les belles lettres,” 1982). Janvier points out also that the replacement of papyrus with the codex in Orosius’ period had the effect of making the reader privilege the top of the “page,” and that this could perhaps explain his orientation “east.” But the oikoumene with its protraction according to longitude could be oriented west as well as east (155–60). 49 Again, see Harvey, “Medieval Maps: An Introduction,” 283–5; Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in The History of Cartography, 286–370. 50 See Janvier, La géographie d’Orose; Janet M. Bately, “The Relationship between Geographical Information in the Old English Orosius and Latin Texts Other than Orosius,” in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Peter Clemoes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 1:45–62. 51 Lucanus, De Bello Civili, 9.518; War withJugurtha in Sallust, ed. and trans. John Carew Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 17.1–7 (131–381). See E. Tiffou, “Salluste et la Géographie,” Romaine et Géographie Historique: Mélanges Offerts à Roger Dion (Paris: Piccard, 1974), 151–60. Medieval Pharsalia manuscripts, in fact, are sometimes illustrated with orbis terrarum maps that lay out the space of the habitable world, and in keeping with ancient views, connect India, Ethiopia, and East Africa. 52 John Block Friedman, “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” and Chapter 4 “Missionaries and Pilgrims among the Monstrous Races,” in The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

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Notes 1981), 37–58 and 59–86. For an earlier discussion of the legend of the antipodes, see G. Boffito, “La leggenda degli antipodi,” Miscellanea Studi Critici edita in onore di Arturo Graf (Vatican Library. No date); G. Boffito, L’Eresia degli antipodi (Florence, 1905).

53 Strabo, 17.3.25; Horace, Odes, ed. and trans. Charles E. Bennett and H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 3.24.1–10. See also Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, with Eng. trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), Epistles 1.6.6. 54 Macrobius, Commentarium in Somnium Scipionis, Book 2.10. 55 See Pliny, Natural History, Book 6; Jacques Le Goff, “L’Occident médiévale et l’Océan Indien: un horizon onirique,” in Pour un autre Moyen Age: Temps, travail et culture en Occident: 18 essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 280–98 argues that Pliny both sanctioned and gave authority to the myth of India in the Middle Ages. 56 See Lippold, “Introduzione,” Orosio, Le Storie Contra I Pagani I, xxxvi–xxxvii. 57 See Stephen Benko, “Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in Christian Interpretation,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 2.31.1 (1980), 646–705, which reprints and translates the eclogue and provides a history of the interpretations in the patristic through medieval periods. He writes, “[T]he influence of Virgil can be detected in [it] several times. Not once, however, are the ‘Eclogues’ alluded to and there is no trace of Virgil as a messianic prophet,” 677. For Virgil as prophet, see William Franke, “Virgil, History, and Prophecy,” Philosophy and Literature 29:1 (2005), 73–88. 58 History 3.20.5–8. See also notes to Orose, Histoires, vol. 2, 239. 59 See William H.C. Frend, “Augustine and Orosius on the End of the Ancient World,” Augustinian Studies 20 (1989), 1–38. 60 “Itaque si creature Dei, merito et dispensatio Dei sumus” (History 2.1.2). 61 “hic et Christiani fuere, qui parcerent, et Christiani, quibus parcerent” (History 2.3.7). 62 Transmitted through Photius, Dion Cassius, and Heliodorus, Ctesias provided the first detailed Greek history of the Assyrian Empire, beginning with Ninus and Semiramis. He lived with the Persian royal family as a protected prisoner after the wars between Cyrus and Artaxerxes and is a major source for ancient knowledge of the Assyrian Empire. According to Ctesias, Semiramis built the city of Babylon and lived a life of luxury in it until she decided to “pacify” Asia by conquering it and declaring war on the Indians; though she successfully ruled Asia, she failed to conquer India. Ctesias, Histoire de l’Orient, préface de

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Charles Malamoud, trans. and commenté in French, Janick Auberger (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991), 32–47; Ctesias, La Perse, l’Inde: Les Sommaires de Photius, ed. R. Henry (Brussels: Office de Publicité, 1947). 63 “Non contenta terminis mulier, quos a viro suo tunc solo bellatore in quinquaginta annis adquisitos susceperat, Aethiopiam bello pressam, sanguine interlitam, imperio adiecit. Indis quoque bellum intulit, quos praeter illam et Alexandrum Magnum nullus intravit. . .” (History 1.4.5). 64 “Haec, libidine ardens, sanguinem sitiens, inter incessabilia et stupra et homicidia, cum omnes quos regie arcessitos, meretricie habitos, concubitu oblectasset occideret, tandem filio flagitiose concepto impie exposito inceste cognito privatam ignominiam publico scelere obtexit. Praecepit enim, ut inter parentes ac filios nulla delata reverentia naturae de coniugiis adpetendis ut cui libitum esset liberum fieret” (History 1.4.7–8). 65 Both Livy’s digression comparing Rome’s outstanding military leaders with Alexander coupled with his assessment of Alexander’s career seem to stem from a rhetorical exercise that contrasted Alexander’s military skills with those of the Romans. Frequent references to Alexander’s conquests suggest Alexander was a theme, even a trope, of ancient Roman literature. See, for example, Pliny 6.21.62; Juvenal and Perseus, ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), Juvenal, Satire 14.311; Horace, Epistle 2.1.232, 241; Ovid, Tristia and Ex Ponto, Eng. trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), Tristia 1.2.79; Statius I, trans. J. H. Mozley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), Sylvae 3.2. Extended contrasts between Alexander and Caesar are also common. In addition to Livy, they also show up in Plutarch and in Lucan. For example, Plutarch’s paired lives of Alexander and Caesar in Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 7, trans. Eng. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 224–439; 442–609; Lucan, Book 10, De Bello Civili, or Livy’s digression on whether Alexander could have conquered Rome in Livy 9.17. In fact, these contrasts are so similar that it seems likely that there was a standard assignment in the rhetorical schools to compare Alexander and Caesar. Quintilian, in fact, lists “whether Alexander is going to find lands beyond the ocean” as a rhetorical practice question (“An Alexander terras ultra Oceanum sit inventurus?”) Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 3.8.16. This might also explain why the conquest of India remained such a tantalizing ambition to the Romans, because Alexander accomplished what they failed to do. Indeed, according to James Romm, Alexander’s plans for extending his Empire grew in importance in Rome as the Empire expanded (The Edges of

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Notes the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992]), 138.

66 “Quolibet haec gesta talia nomine censeantur, hoc est sive dicantur miseriae sive virtutes, utraque prioribus conparata in hoc tempore minora sunt, atque ita utraque pro nobis faciunt in conparatione Alexandri atque Persarum: si virtus nunc vocanda est, minor est hostium; si miseria, minor est Romanorum” (History 3.20.13). 67 “Anno post eversionem Troiae . . . urbs Roma in Italia a Romulo et Remo geminis auctoribus condita est” (History 2.4.1). 68 “Urbemque constituit; regnum avi, muros fratris, templum soceri sanguine dedicavit; sceleratorum manum promissa inpunitate collegit” (History 2.4.3). 69 See Serres, Rome: Le Livre des foundations. 70 “iam hinc incessabilia certamina et iuxta quantitatem virium semper gravia quam brevissime strinxerum” (History 2.4.8). 71 “Si Romani colendo deos emeruerunt favorem deorum et non colendo amiserunt: ut ipse Romulus, parens Romae, inter tot mala ab ipso ortu suo ingruentia salvus esset, colendo quis meruit? An Amulius avus, qui exposuit ad necem? An pater, qui incertus fuit? An Rhea mater stupri rea?” (History 6.1.13–14). 72 Inglebert, Les Romains Chrétiens, 544. 73 See Chydenius, “The Typological Problem in Dante,” 51–8. 74 “Sed Ecclesia Dei iam per totum Orbem uberrime germinante, hoc tamquam effetum ac vacuum nullique usui bono commodum arbitrio Dei auferendum fuit. Itaque Titus, imperator ab exercitu pronuntiatus, templum in Hierosolymis incendit ac diruit . . . Sexcenta milia Iudaeorum eo bello interfecta Cornelius et Suetonius referunt” (History, 7.9.5–7). 75 “Sufficientia ut arbitror documenta collecta sunt, quibus absque ullo arcano, quod paucorum fidelium est, probari de medio queat, unum illum et verum Deum, quem Christiana fides praedicat, et condidisse mundum creaturamque eius, cum voluit, et disposuisse per multa, cum per multa ignoraretur, et confirmasse ad unum, cum per unicum declaratus est, simulque potentiam patientiamque eius multimodis argumentis eluxisse” (History 7.1.1). 76 “Explicui adiuvante Christo secundum praeceptum tuum, beatissime pater Augustine, ab initio mundi usque in praesentem diem, hoc est per annos quinque milia sescentos decem et octo, cupiditates et punitiones hominum peccatorum, conflictationes saeculi et iudicia Dei quam brevissime et quam simplicissime potui, Christianis tamen temporibus propter praesentem magis Christi gratiam ab illa incredulitatis confusione discretis” (History 7.43.19).

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Chapter 3 1 As Rist points out in Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, 19. See G. Bardy, “Introduction Générale,” La Cité de Dieu in Oeuvres de Saint Augustin vols 33–7 in Bibliothèque Augustiniennes (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, l959–1960), 9–22. 2 For discussions of Augustine’s theory of signs and his rhetorical training, see Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana; Rist, Augustine, 23–40; Stock, Augustine the Reader; Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); George Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Mark D. Jordan’s essay “Words and Word: Incarnation and Signification in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana,” Augustinian Studies 11 (1980), 177–96; Brenda Schildgen, “St. Augustine’s Answer to Jacques Derrida in the De Doctrina Christiana,” New Literary History 25.2 (Spring, 1994), 383–97; Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 8–81. 3 Again, the principle idea of Stock, Augustine the Reader. 4 See Ernest L. Fortin, “The Political Implications of St. Augustine’s Theory of Conscience,” Augustinian Studies 1 (1970), 133–52, for how Augustine attempts to finesse Roman ideas of civic virtue as the rule for living in temporal societies. 5 See Bardy, “Introduction Générale,” La Cité de Dieu 33, 9–22. 6 “ego exardescens zelo domus dei adversus eorum blasphemias vel errores libros de civitate Dei scribere institui” (Retractionum 2.43 ). 7 See for example, François Paschoud, “Saint Augustin,” Roma Aeterna: Études sur le patriotisme romain dans l’occident latin à l’époque des grandes invasions (Rome: Institut Suisse de Rome, 1967); Augustine: Political Writings, ed. E.M. Atkins and R.J. Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); R.W. Dyson, The Pilgrim City: Social and Political Ideas in the Writings of St. Augustine of Hippo (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2001); John von Heyking, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (Colombia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2001). 8 See Paschoud, Roma Aeterna; Peter Busch, “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for the Afterlife,” in Augustine and History, ed. Christopher T. Daly, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2008), 3–30; Andrew R. Murphy, “Augustine and the Rhetoric of Roman Decline,” in Augustine and History, 53–74; Brian Harding, Augustine and Roman Virtue (New York: Continuum, 2008).

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9 For a full discussion of the theories of the origins of the ideas and their persuasiveness, see Van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon, 199–359. 10 Rist, Augustine, represents how and what Augustine digested from his pagan education and intellectual exploration, 1–22 (12). For Augustine’s stoicism, see Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 142–238. See also, James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 11 This is the principle position of a number of scholars of Augustine including among others H.-I Marrou, Peter Brown, Brian Stock, and John Rist. 12 See Henri-Irénée Marrou, L’ambivalence du temps de l’histoire chez Saint Augustin, Conférence Albert-le-Grand, 1950 (Montreal: Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1950), where Marrou writes that Augustine believed that until the end of time, or as long as historical time endured, the two cities were intimately interlinked (77–8). 13 See, of course, Henri-Irénée Marrou, Théologie de l’histoire (Paris: Le Seuil, 1968); Peter Brown, “Saint Augustine,” in Trends in Medieval Political Thought, ed. Beryl Smalley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), reprinted in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 25–45; R.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); M. Vessey, “The Demise of the Christian Writer and the Remaking of Late Antiquity’: From Henri-Irénée Marrou’s Saint Augustine (1938) to Peter Brown’s Holy Man (1983),” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6.3 (1998), 377–411. 14 Walter Benjamin, “Sur le concept d’histoire,” trans. P. Missac, Les Temps Modernes 3.25 (October, 1947), 623–34. 15 Ibid., 625–7. 16 Ibid., 628. 17 Ibid., 632–4. 18 For this interpretation of Paul, see Giorgio Agamben, Il tempo che resta: un commento alla lettera ai Romani (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), 60–84. 19 See Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, 68. 20 See Book 11 of the Confessions for Augustine’s discussion of time. For an analysis of Augustine’s concept of time, see Ricoeur, “The Aporias of the Experience of Time in Book 11 of Augustine’s Confessions,” Time and Narrative 1, 5–30. 21 Ronald B. Herzman, “Dante and the Apocalypse,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, N.Y.:

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Cornell University Press, 1992), 398–413. See, for example, Dante’s description of the beast Geryon, the symbol of fraud in Inferno 17, “Ecco la fiera con la coda aguzza” (“Behold the beast with the pointed tail” [Inferno 17.1]) and “La faccia sua era faccia d’uom giusto” (“His face was the face of a just man” [Inferno 17.10]) echo Apocalypse 9.7–10: “et facies earum sect facies hominum . . . et habebant caudas similes scorpionum” (“and their faces were like human faces . . .and they had tails like scorpions”). The imagery in Inferno 19 where the simoniac popes are condemned also adopts the language of the Apocalypse (17.1–3, 7, 9, 12, 18), as Dante indicts the shepherds for “puttaneggiar coi regi” (“fornicating with the kings” [Inferno 19.108]). Other allusions to John’s Apocalypse in the Commedia raise the specter of end times, as for example, “sigillum sextum” (“sixth seal”) or “alterum angelum ascendentem ab ortu solis/ habentem sigillum Dei” (“another angel rising from the east, carrying the seal of the living God” [Apocalypse 7.2]) and Francis’s rising in the east and receiving “l’ultimo sigillo” (“the last seal” [Paradiso 11.107]). The “magno volume” (great volume) read by Cacciaguida (Paradiso 15.50) recalls the “libro vitae” of Apocalypse 3.5, 20.12–15, 21.27, 22.9–10, where the names of the saved are inscribed. Dante’s river of light in Paradiso 30.61–9 adopts language from the river of the water of life of Apocalypse 22.1: “et ostendit mihi fluvium aquae vitae splendidum tamquam cristallum precedentem de sede Dei” (“Then [the angel] showed me the river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal flowing from the throne of God”). 22 See Van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon, 127–9. 23 This idea is fundamental to the work. See La Cité de Dieu 33, I–V, note p. 191. 24 Van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon, 103. 25 “imperii nostri quo quasi punctum eius attingimus.” Cicero, “Somnium Scipionis,” in De Re Publica, 6.16. 26 Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 456–516. 27 See MacCormack, The Shadows of Poetry, 161–74. 28 Paschoud, “Saint Augustin,” Roma Aeterna, 245, passim. 29 “Sed cum esset adepta libertas, tanta cupido gloriae incesserat, ut parum esset sola libertas nisi et dominatio quaereretur, dum pro magno habetur . . .” (City of God 5.12.54–6). 30 See MacCormack, Shadows of Poetry, 190. 31 See Robert J. Goar, “Reflections on Some Anti-Roman Elements in the De Civitate Dei, Books 1–V,” Augustinian Studies 19 (1988), 71–84. 32 Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, 217–18.

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33 “Illi in principibus eius vel in eis quas subiugat nationibus dominandi libido dominatur; in hac serviunt invicem in caritate et praepositi consulendo et subditi obtemperando. Illa in suis potentibus diligit virtutem suam; haec dicit Deo suo: Diligam te, Domine virtus mea” (City of God 14.28.7–12). 34 For an overview of the symbolic, historical, and typological role of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian tradition, see Chydenius, Typological Problem in Dante, 51–120. 35 See Augustine, De genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, PL 34, col. 291–93, 3.19.29–31. 36 “. . . duo regna cernimus longe ceteris provenisse clariora, Assyriorum primum, deinde Romanorum, ut temporibus, ita locis inter se ordinata atque distincta. Nam quo modo illud prius, hoc posterius, eo modo illud in Oriente, hoc in Occidente surrexit; denique in illius fine huius initium confestim fuit. Regna cetera ceterosque reges velut adpendices istorum dixerim” (City of God 18.2.19–25). 37 “civitas Roma velut altera Babylon et velut prioris filia Babylonis” (18.22.1–2); “ubi et ipsa Roma quasi secuda Babylonia est” (City of God 18.2.65–6). 38 “veluti alteram in occidente Babyloniam” (City of God 16.17.33–4; 18.27–9). 39 “nullum maius primis temporibus quam Assyriorum fuit” (City of God 18.2.43–54). 40 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, trans. John Ferguson (Washington, D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 1.71; 1.72. 41 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 99. 42 For Augustine’s ethnic origins, see Karla Pollmann, St. Augustine the Algerian (Göttingen: Edition Ruprecht, 2007), 17–19. 43 See The Geography of Strabo, vol. 7.15.1.59–60. 44 “Quid dicam de Cynocephalis, quorum canina capita atque ipse latratus magis bestias quam homines confitetur? Sed omnia genera hominum, quae dicuntur esse, credere non est necesse. Verum quisquis uspiam nascitur homo, id est animal rationale mortale, quamlibet nostris inusitatam sensibus gerat corporis formam seu colorem sive motum sive sonum sive qualibet vi, qualibet parte, qualibet qualitate naturam: ex illo uno protoplasto originem ducere nullus fidelium dubitaverit. Apparet tamen quid in pluribus natura obtinuerit et quid sit ipsa raritate mirabile” (City of God 16.8.18–28). 45 “aut illa, quae talia de quibusdam gentibus scripta sunt, omnino nulla sunt; aut si sunt, homines non sunt; aut ex Adam sunt, si homines sunt” (City of God 16.8.80–83). The position I take here differs from those who have argued that Augustine believed that “monstrous races” existed and that they were outside the economy of Christian salvation. See, for example, “Wonder Books and

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Grotesque Facts,” in Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 77. See also Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Akin to my position is John Kleiner, Mismapping the Underworld: Daring and Error in Dante’s Comedy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), who writes, “Augustine warns readers of the City of God not to misinterpret such creatures. It would be a crime, he insists, to imagine . . . that their distorted shapes are evidence of God’s incompetence” (126). Still by far the best discussion of the tradition and Augustine’s place in the discussion of monstrous races is Jean Céard, La Nature et les Prodiges: L’insolite au XVIe siécle, en France (Genève: Droz, 1977), particularly, 3–59. 46 Othmar Perler, Les Voyages de Saint Augustin (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1969). 47 Pierre Maraval, “Jérôme et le pélerinage aux lieux saints de Palestine,” in Jérôme entre l’Occident et l’Orient: XVIe centenaire du départ de saint Jérôme de Rome et de son installation à Bethléem: actes du Colloque de Chantilly (Septembre 1986), ed. Yves-Marie Duval (Paris: Études augustininiennes, 1988), 345–53, provides an excellent discussion of Jerome’s attitudes; also Pierre Maraval, Lieux saints et pèlerinage d’Orient: Histoire et géographie des origines à la conquête arabe (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1985); also Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire AD 312–460, 87–94. 48 “Ex Sion enim prodiet lex et verbum Domini ab Hierusalem” (City of God 10.32.88–9). 49 For Augustine and the Jews, see Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008). 50 “Erat tempus, quando non erat Roma; erat tempus, quando non erat Hierusalem” (City of God 12.16.58–9). 51 For an analysis and historical tracing of the motif of “pilgrimage” in Augustine and the early Church Fathers, see M. A. Claussen, “Peregrinatio and Peregrini in Augustine’s City of God and the Image and Idea of Pilgrimage as a Metaphor for the Christian Life in the Writing of the Early Church fathers,” Traditio 46 (1991), 33–75. 52 “Regnavit ergo David in terrena Hierusalem, filius caelestis Hierusalem” (City of God 17.20.1–2). 53 Stock, Augustine the Reader, 168. 54 Jerome, Commentariorum in Hiezechielem Libri IV, CCSL 75 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1964).

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55 “Locus ergo iste, qui promittitur tam pacatae ac securae habitationis, aeternus est aeternisque debetur in matre Hierusalem libera, ubi erit veraciter populus Israel; hoc enim nomen interpretatur ‘videns Deum’ ’’ (City of God 17.13.23–6). 56 “Nomen quoque ipsius civitatis nequaquam erit ut prius ‘Hierosolyma’ quae interpretatur visio pacis sed ‘Adonai sam’ quod in latinum sermonem vertitur ‘Dominus ibidem’ ’’ (Comm. on Ezekiel 14.48.30–5, 743.) 57 See Stock, Augustine the Reader, 168–9. 58 See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 89–112. 59 The conclusion to Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) is the most eloquent statement of Augustine’s position on salvation. 60 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 324. 61 See Van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon, 115–63. 62 See Rüdiger Bittner, “Augustine’s Philosophy of History,” in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 345–60. 63 See Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics 1.225–44; Burns, “Augustine’s Use of Sallust in the City of God: The Role of the Grammatical Tradition,” in History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination, 105–114. 64 Inglebert, Les Romains Chrétiens discusses the use of the word historia in Augustine’s City of God, 399–419. 65 See Markus, Saeculum, 75. 66 Again, see Harding, Augustine and Roman Virtue, 74–83. 67 Paschoud, Roma Aeterna, 257–62. 68 See Harding, Augustine and Roman Virtue, 35–70. 69 G. J. P. O’Daly, “Thinking Through History: Augustine’s Method in the City of God and Its Ciceronian Dimension,” in History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination, 45–57. 70 See John Mark Mattox, Saint Augustine and the Theory of Just War (London: Continuum, 2006), 14–18. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations (New York: Heinemann, 1927); Cicero, De Natura Deorum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 71 O’Daly argues, and I would agree, that this position comes from Ciceronian prompts. See “Augustine’s Method,” 53–4; see also Norman H. Baynes, “The Political Ideas of St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei” in Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London: Athlone Press, 1955), 288–306.

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72 See George J. Lavere, “The Problem of the Common Good in Saint Augustine’s Civitas Terrena,” Augustinian Studies 14 (1983), 1–10. 73 Busch, “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for the Afterlife,” Augustine and History, 23–25. 74 War with Catiline, in Sallust, 1–129. 75 “Deleta quippe Carthagine magno scilicet terrore Romanae rei publicae depulso et extincto tanta de rebus prosperis orta mala continuo subsecuta sunt, ut corrupta diruptaque concordia prius saevis cruentisque seditionibus, deinde mox malarum conexione causarum bellis etiam civilibus tantae strages ederentur, tantus sanguis effunderetur, tanta cupiditate proscriptionum ac rapinarum ferveret inmanitas, ut Romani illi, qui vita integriore mala metuebant ab hostibus, perdita integritate vitae crudeliora paterentur a civibus; eaque ipsa libido dominandi, quae inter alia vitia generis humani meracior inerat universo populo Romano, postea quam in paucis potentioribus vicit, obtritos fatigatosque ceteros etiam iugo servitutis oppressit” (City of God 1.30.20–32). 76 Oliver Phillips, “St. Augustine’s Lucanesque Moment: The Third Book of the City of God,” Augustinian Studies 22 (1991), 161–2. 77 “qui videtur non adhuc vel ipsorum opinione gloriosam, sed contentiosam et exitiosam et plane iam enervem ac languidam libertatem omni modo extorsisse Romanis et ad regale arbitrium cuncta revocasse et quasi morbida vetustate conlapsam veluti instaurasse ac renovasse rem publicam . . .” (City of God 3.21.45–50). 78 “circuitus illi eadem revolventes locum non habent, quos maxime refellit aeterna vita sanctorum (City of God 12.20.29–39). Again, see also Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 456–516. 79 See Stephan Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in the Light of her Dissertation on St. Augustine (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2008). Arendt’s dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1929), was translated into English as Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3–112. 80 Again, see Inglebert, Les Romains Chrétiens, 495. 81 George J. Lavere, “The Political Realism of Saint Augustine,” Augustinian Studies 11 (1980), 135–44. 82 Again, Paschoud, Roma Aeterna, 258–9. 83 Plato’s Timaeus in Plato, bilingual edition, trans. Rev. R.G. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 39d; Origen, De Principiis; On First

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Notes Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth and intro. Henri de Lubac (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), 2.3.1; 3.5.3. See City of God, 12.14.

84 “qua causa Deus unus verus et iustus Romanos secundum quandam formam terrenae civitatis bonos adiuverit ad tanti imperii gloriam consequendam” (City of God 5.19.49–52). 85 On Augustine’s rethinking and awareness of his own intellectual change, see, for example, De Praedestinatione Sanctorum, PL 44, 4.8, col. 965–66; De Dono Perseverentiae, PL 45, 21.55, col. 1028; De Dono Perseverentiae, Eng. trans., intro. and comm. Mary Alphonsine Lesousky (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1956), (21.55) where Augustine writes, “For that reason I am now undertaking a review of my works, so that I may show that I do not even agree with my own views in every matter now.” See Thomas F. Martin, O.S.A., “Modus Inveniendi Paulum: Augustine, Hermeneutics, and His Reading of Romans,” in Engaging Augustine on Romans: Self, Context, and Theology in Interpretation, ed. Daniel Patte and Eugene TeSelle (Harrisburg, PA.: Trinity Press International, 2002), 63–90. 86 Lavere, “The Political Realism of Saint Augustine,” 137. 87 Letter 87 in St. Augustine Letters vol. 2 (83–130), trans. Sister Wilfrid Parsons S.N.D. (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1953), 12–22; see also Chapter 3, “Using Government: Augustine and the Donatists,” in Peter Iver Kaufman, Incorrectly Political: Augustine and Thomas More (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 71–98; E.M. Atkins and Robert Dodaro, “The Donatist Controversy,” in Augustine: Political Writings, which includes nine of Augustine’s letters dealing with the Donatist controversy (127–203); also, William H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 239–41, 290–99; also Frend, “Augustine and Orosius On the End of the Ancient World,” 9. 88 See Mattox, Saint Augustine and the Theory of Just War, 30–1. 89 See Markus, Saeculum, 43, 53, 100–01. 90 See Baynes, “The Political Ideas of St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei,” 801; see also Bittner, “Augustine’s Philosophy of History.” 91 Rist, Augustine, 225–6. 92 See ibid., 226–34. 93 Lavere, “The Influence of Saint Augustine on Early Medieval Political Theory,” Augustinian Studies 12 (1981), 1–10. 94 William P. Haggerty, “Augustine, the “Mixed Life,” and “Classical Political Philosophy: Reflections on Compositio in Book 19 of the City of God,” Augustinian Studies 23 (1992), 160–1.

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95 Benjamin, “Sur le concept d’histoire,” 623–34. 96 See Harry O. Meier, “The End of the City and the City Without End: The City of God as Revelation,” in History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination, 153 (153–64); also available in Augustinian Studies 30.2 (1999). See also Virginia Burrus, “An Immoderate Feast: Augustine Reads John’s Apocalypse,” in History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination, 183–94. 97 Paschoud, Roma Aeterna, 234–75. 98 Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 516; see also Christopher T. Daly, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth, eds, Augustine and History, vii. 99 See Brown, Augustine of Hippo; Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), “The new emphasis on the individual led as it did in the case of Augustine, to a preoccupation with the psychology of the inner life that was altogether new in ancient thought” (186). 100 See Fortin, “The Political Implications of St. Augustine’s Theory of Conscience,” 144–5. 101 Stock, Augustine the Reader; A. D. Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 254–71. 102 Stock, Augustine the Reader, 277. 103 Markus, Saeculum, 23; see also Ricoeur, “Christianity and History,” History and Truth, 81–97. 104 See Maier, “The End of the City and the City Without End,” in History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination, 153–64. 105 See Gaetano Lettieri, Il senso della storia in Agostino d’Ippona. Il “saeculum” e la gloria nel “De Civitate Dei” (Rome: Edizioni Borla, 1988), 9–10. 106 As Bittner puts it in “Augustine’s Philosophy of History,” 347. 107 Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2002), 1, 64–5. 108 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Augustine’s Political Realism,” in Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 134 (119–46). 109 See Robert L. Holmes, “St. Augustine and the Just War Theory,” in The Augustinian Tradition, 337 (323–44). See also David A. Lenihan, “ The Just War Theory in the Work of Saint Augustine,” Augustinian Studies 19 (1988), 37–70, who concludes that the complexity of Augustine’s thought was lost very early and the perversion of his message began with forgery and duplicity (37).

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110 See Mattox, Saint Augustine and the Theory of Just War, for a full analysis of this idea in Augustine’s thought, 39. 111 Lidia Storoni Mazzolani, Sant’ Agostino e i pagani (Palermo: Setterio Editore, 1988). 112 Brown, The Gospel According to John, 175–81. 113 “Capiunt ergone te caelum et terra, quoniam tu imples ea? An imples et restat, quoniam non te capiunt? Et quo refundis quidquid impleto caelo et terra restat ex te?. . . Non enim uasa, quae te plena sunt . . .” (Confessions, 1.3.1). Augustine, Confessions, 22.

Chapter 4 1 See Shaw, “Introduction,” Dante Monarchia, xviii–xix; also Charles Till Davis, “Remigio de’ Girolami and Dante: A Comparison of their Conceptions of Peace,” in Dante: The Critical Complex, ed. Richard Lansing (London: Routledge, 2003), 243–74 discusses Dante’s conception of civic peace and its links with Aristotelian politics. Davis includes the Latin text of Remigio’s De bono pacis (261–74). 2 See Claire Honess, “Introduction,” Dante Alighieri: Four Political Letters, trans. and intro. Claire Honess (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2007), 19–23. 3 Davis, “Remigio de’ Girolami and Dante,” 248. 4 Niebuhr, “Augustine’s Political Realism,” in Christian Realism and Political Problems, 119–46. 5 Charles T. Davis, “Dante and the Empire,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante,ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 67–79. 6 Lino Pertile, La Puttana e il gigante: Dal Cantico dei Cantici al Paradiso Terrestre di Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 1998), 17. 7 Bruno Nardi’s term for Dante’s use of the Aeneid as political history. See Bruno Nardi, Nel Mondo di Dante (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 1944), 204–05. 8 Dante, Epistole, ed. Ermenegildo Pistelli in Le Opere di Dante: testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana (Florence: Società Dantesca Italiana, 1960), 383–415. See also notes to Letters 5 and 7 in Honess, Dante Alighieri, notes 6 and 9, 48. 9 See Étienne Gilson, Dante: The Philosopher, trans. David Moore (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1949), 165–6. For works on Dante’s idea of Rome, his politics, and the roles of pope and emperor, see footnote 6 in the “Introduction.”

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10 Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, 164. 11 See George Holmes, “Dante’s Attitude to the Popes,” in Dante and Governance, ed. John Woodhouse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), who dates it 1312–14 (46–57); see Ascoli, 230, footnote 2, for the most current overview of the debates about dating and the relationship between such speculation and the political events that are tied to Dante’s views or to Dante’s poetic and political development. For example, Dante’s exile from Florence is often tied to early dates to show how the views reflect his response to papal interference in Florence’s affairs, and the removal of the papacy to Avignon (1302–08), and later dates to Henry VII’s entrance into Italy (1311–13). Cassell dates the Monarchia at 1318, and argues that it is a commentary on the “savage controversy” around Pope John XXII’s refusal to recognize Ludwig IV as Holy Roman Emperor. See Anthony K. Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy: An Historical Study with Accompanying Translations of Dante Alighieri’s Monarchia, Guido Vernani’s Refutation of the Monarchia Composed by Dante, and Pope John XXII’s Bull Si fratrum (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of American Press, 2004), 3–4. 12 Shaw, Monarchia, xl; Gilson, Dante: The Philosopher. 13 Again, see Shaw, Monarchia, xxxviii. 14 Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 59. 15 Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 229, 242, 244. 16 Shaw, “Introduction,” Monarchia, xxvii. 17 Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 271–72. 18 See Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 20–21. 19 Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 229–73. 20 Guido Vernani, De Reprobatione Falsae Monarchiae, ed. N. Matteini in his Il piú antico oppositore politico di Dante: Guido Vernani da Rimini (Padua: CEDAM, 1958), 93–118; also, see Aldo Vallone, Antidantismo politico nel XIV secolo, especially Chapter 2; the most detailed discussion occurs in Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy. 21 See Gabrielle Carletti, Dante Politico: La felicità terrena secondo il pontefice, il filosofo, l’imperatore (Pescara: ESA, 2006), 19–20. 22 Charles T. Davis “The Florentine Studia and Dante’s ‘Library,’ ’’ in The Divine Comedy and the Encyclopedia of Arts and Sciences, ed. Giuseppe Di Scipio and Aldo Scaglione (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Co., 1988), 339–66. 23 On Dante and Aristotle or Aristotelianism, see Charles T. Davis, “Remigio de’ Girolami and Dante,” 248; Charles T. Davis, “Remigio de’Girolami, O.P. (d. 1319) Lector of S. Maria Novella in Florence,” in Le Scuole degli ordini

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Notes mendicanti (Todi, 1978), 283–304; Maria Consiglia De Matteis, La “teologia politica comunale” di Remigio de’Girolami (Bologna: Pàtron Editore, 1977); Ovidio Capitani, “Il De Peccato Usure di Remigio de’Girolami,” in Studia Medievali Serie Terza 6: 2 (1965): 537–662; Jean Leclerq, “Textes contemporains de Dante sur les sujets qu’il a traités,” Studi Medievali Serie Terza 6: 2 (1965): 491–535; Giuseppe di Scipio, “Dante and Politics,” in The Divine Comedy and the Encyclopaedia of Arts and Science, 267–84; Scott, Dante’s Political Purgatory, 3–13; Shaw, “Introduction,” Monarchia, xiii–xli.

24 John of Salisbury, Policratici I and II, ed. Clemens C. I. Webb (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909); Denis Foulechat, Le Policratique de Jean de Salisbury, Livre V, ed. Charles Brucker (Geneva: Droz, 2006), 455–727. 25 André Pézard, “Du Policraticus à la Divine Comédie,” Romania 70 (1948–49), 1–36, 163–91. 26 Le Policratique de Jean de Salisbury, Livre V, 458–67. 27 Bernard of Clairveaux, De Consideratione, in Opera, vol. 3, ed. J. Leclerq and H. M. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1963); also, see Steven Botterill, “Not of This World: Spiritual and Temporal Powers in Dante and Bernard of Clairveaux,” Lectura Dantis 10 (Spring, 1992), 8–21. 28 See “Spirituel et Temporel,” in Alexandre Masseron, Dante et Saint Bernard (Paris: A. Michel, 1953), 223–52, for a discussion of the similarities between Dante’s criticisms of the Church and temporal power and Bernard’s critique. 29 See the bull Unam Sanctam (November 1302) in Corpus Iuris Canonici in 2 vols, ed. Aemilius Friedberg (Graz: Akademische Druck- U. Verlagsanstalt, 1955), vol. 2, cols 1245–46. 30 For the text of Clericis laicos, see Corpus Iuris Canonici, vol. 2, cols 1062–64. 31 Pierre Dubois, De Recuperatione Terre Sancte: Dalla “Respublica Christiana” ai primi nazionalismi e alla politica antimediterranea (1305–1307), ed. and intro. Angelo Diotti (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1977). 32 For a detailed view of how Dante both avoids mentioning these texts and figures, while at the same time engaging in a debate with them, see Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy, 5–22. 33 Unam sanctam, Corpus Iuris Canonici, vol. 2, col. 1245. 34 Translation comes from “Unam Sanctum,” in Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII, ed. Charles T. Wood (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 69. “Porro subesse Romano Pontifici omni humanae creaturae declaramus, dicimus, diffinimus et pronunciamus omnino esse de necessitate salutis” (Corpus Iuris Canonici 2, col. 1246).

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35 For a textual history of the sacedotium/imperium controversy in the period, see Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy, 5–22. 36 Shaw, “Introduction,” Monarchia; Limentani, 133; Davis, “Dante and the Empire,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, 67–79. 37 Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 229–73. 38 Davis, “Dante and the Empire,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, 73. 39 “Eterni pia providentia Regis, qui dum coelestia sua bonitate perpetuat, infera nostra despiciendo non deserit, sacrosancto Romanorum Imperio res humanas disposuit gubernandas, ut sub tanti serenitate presedii genus mortale quiesceret, et ubique, natura poscente, civiliter, degeretur” (Epistole 6.1; translation from Letter 6, in Dante Alighieri: Four Political Letters, 59). 40 D’ Entrèves, Dante as Political Thinker, 27–8. 41 “Primum quidem igitur videndum quid est quod ‘temporalis Monarchia’ dicitur, typo ut dicam et secundum intentionem. Est ergo temporalis Monarchia, quam dicunt ‘Imperium,’ unicus principatus et super omnes in tempore vel in hiis et super hiis que tempore mensurantur” (Monarchia 1.2.1–2). 42 “Maxime autem de hac tria dubitata queruntur: primo nanque dubitata et queritur an ad bene esse mundi necessaria sit; secundo an romanus populus de iure Monarche offitium sibi asciverit; et tertio an auctoritas Monarche dependeat a Deo inmediate vel ab alio, Dei ministro seu vicario” (Monarchia 1.2.3). 43 “nunc constat quod totum humanum genus ordinatur ad unum, ut iam preostensum fuit: ergo unum oportet esse regulans sive regens, et hoc ‘Monarcha’ sive ‘Imperator dici debet. Et sic patet quod ad bene esse mundi necesse est Monarchiam esse sive Imperium” (Monarchia 1.5.9). 44 As for example, James of Viterbo, De regimine Christiano, ed. and trans. R.W. Dyson (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Giles of Rome, On Ecclesiastical Power (De ecclesiastica potestate): A Medieval Theory of World Government, ed. and trans. R.W. Dyson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); or Pierre Dubois, De Recuperatione Terre Sancte. See Black, Political Thought in Europe, for a detailed discussion of the range of political theories circulating. 45 Davis, “Remigio de’Girolami and Dante”; Davis, “Dante and the Empire.” 46 For Augustine and just war, see Mattox, Saint Augustine and the Theory of Just War; Lenihan, “The Influence of Augustine’s Just War: The Early Middle Ages”; Holmes, “St. Augustine and the Just War Theory”; John Kelsay and James Turner Johnson, eds Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions (New York: Greenwood Press, 199l); Lenihan, “The Just War Theory in the Work of Saint Augustine,” 37–70; Lavere,

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Notes “The Political Realism of Saint Augustine”; Niebuhr, “Augustine’s Political Realism,” in Christian Realism and Political Problems, 119–46; William R. Stevenson, Jr, Christian Love and Just War: Moral Paradox and Political Life in St. Augustine and His Modern Interpreters (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987); R. A. Markus, “Saint Augustine’s Views on the Just War,” Studies in Church History 20 (1983), 1–13.

47 Anselmus Episcopus Lucensis, Collectio Canonum una cum Collectione Minore, ed. Friedrich Thaner (Innsbruck: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1965; rpt. Oenipotente: Libraire Academicae Wagneninae, 1906); for commentary, see Renato Montanari, La “Collectio Canonum” di S. Anselmo di Lucca e la riforma gregoriana (Mantua: Tip. Industriale, 1941), who explains that the Collectio of Anselm uses passages from Augustine and Pope Gregory to develop the concept of justice and just vengeance which can never be separated from Christian charity. Anselm discusses how just war can be conducted and how the Church should conduct itself based on the great fundamental law of charity (72–3). 48 See Aldo Vallone, Antidantismo politico nel XIV secolo (Naples: Liguori, 1973). 49 “Declarata igitur duo sunt; quorum unum est, quod quicunque bonum rei publice intendit finem iuris intendit: aliud est, quod romanus populus subiciendo sibi orbem bonum publicum intendit. Nunc arguatur ad propositum sic: quicunque finem iuris intendit cum iure graditur; romanus populus subiciendo sibi orbem finem iuris intendit, ut manifeste per superiora in isto capitulo est probatum; ergo romanus populus subiciendo sibi orbem cum iure hoc fecit, et per consequens de iure sibi ascivit Imperii dignitatem” (Monarchia 2.5.18–20). 50 “Rationibus omnibus supra positis experientia memorabilis attestatur: status videlicet illius mortalium quem Dei Filius, in salutem hominis hominem assumpturus, vel expectavit vel cum voluit ipse disposuit. Nam si a lapsu primorum parentum, qui diverticulum fuit totius nostre deviationis, dispositiones hominum et tempora recolamus, non inveniemus nisi sub divo Augusto monarcha, existente Monarchia perfecta, mundum undique fuisse quietum. Et quod tunc humanum genus fuerit felix in pacis universalis tranquillitate hoc ystoriographi omnes, hoc poete illustres, hoc etiam scriba mansuetudinis Cristi testari dignatus est; et denique Paulus “plenitudinem temporis” statum illum felicissimum appellavit” (Monarchia 1.16.1–2). 51 “Admirabar equidem aliquando romanum populum in orbe terrarum sine ulla resistentia fuisse prefectum, cum, tantum superficialiter intuens, illum nullo iure sed armorum tantummodo violentia obtinuisse arbitrabar” (Monarchia 2.1.2).

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52 See Scott, Dante’s Political Purgatory, 29, 30, 38, passim, for an overview of the arguments about dating this change of position; see also Shaw, “Introduction,” Monarchia, xxii–xxiii; Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy, 72–3. 53 Davis makes this point in “Dante and the Empire,” 76. 54 For Dante’s sources on this idea, see Silverstein, “On the Genesis of De Monarchia, II, v,” in Dante in America: The First Two Centuries, 187–218. 55 “Desinant igitur Imperium exprobrare romanum qui se filios Ecclesie fingunt, cum videant sponsum Cristum illud sic in utroque termino sue militie comprobasse. Et iam sufficienter manifestum esse arbitror, romanum populum sibi de iure orbis Imperium ascivisse” (Monarchia 2.11.7). 56 Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 248. 57 The scholarship on Book 3 is expansive. See, for example, Maccarrone, “Il terzo libro della Monarchia”; Maccarrone, “Papato e Impero nella Monarchia”; Nardi, Saggi di filosofia dantesca; Nardi, “Intorno ad una nuova interpretazione del terzo libro della Monarchia dantesca,” in Dal “Convivio” alla “Commedia,” 151–313; Sistrunk, “Obligations of the Emperor as the Reverent Son in Dante’s Monarchia”; di Scipio, “Dante and Politics,” in The Divine Comedy and the Encyclopedia of Arts and Sciences. 58 “Usque adhuc patet propositum per rationes que plurimum rationabilibus principiis innituntur; sed ex nunc ex principiis fidei cristiane iterum patefaciendum est” (Monarchia 2.10.1). 59 “Et supra totum humanum genus Tyberius Cesar, cuius vicarius erat Pilatus, iurisdictionem non habuisset, nisi romanum Imperium de iure fuisset. Hinc est quod Herodes, quamvis ignorans quid faceret, sicut et Cayphas cum verum dixit de celesti decreto, Cristum Pilato remisit ad iudicandum, ut Lucas in evangelio suo tradit. . . Desinant igitur Imperium exprobrare romanum qui se filios Ecclesie fingunt, cum videant sponsum Cristum illud sic in utroque termino sue militie comprobasse. Et iam sufficienter manifestum esse arbitror, romanum populum sibi de iure orbis Imperium ascivisse” (Monarchia 2.11.5–6). 60 See Benfell, The Biblical Dante, 36–47. 61 Shaw, Monarchia, xxvi–xxix. 62 Again, see Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, for Dante’s appropriation of biblical authority to himself, 19–95. 63 “assumpta fiducia de verbis Danielis premissis, in quibus divina potentia clypeus defensorum veritatis astruitur, iuxta monitionem Pauli fidei loricam induens, in calore carbonis illius quem unus de Seraphin accepit de altari celesti et tetigit labia Ysaie, gignasium presens ingrediar, et in brachio Illius qui nos de potestate

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Notes tenebrarum liberavit in sanguine suo impium atque mendacem de palestra, spectante mundo, eiciam. Quid timeam, cum Spiritus Patri et Filio coecternus aiat per os David: ‘In memoria ecterna erit iustus, ab auditione mala non timebit’?” (Monarchia 3.1.3–4).

64 “Questio igitur presens, de qua inquisitio futura est, inter duo luminaria magna versatur: romanum scilicet Pontificem et romanum Principem; et queritur utrum auctoritas Monarche romani, qui de iure Monarcha mundi est, ut in secundo libro probatum est, inmediate a Deo . . . quem Petri successorem intelligo, qui vere claviger est regni celorum” (Monarchia 3.1.5). 65 De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (1440, ed. Mainz, 1518); see Nardi, “Intorno ad una nuova interpretazione del terzo libro della Monarchia dantesca,” 151–313. 66 “Dicunt adhuc quidam quod Constantinus imperator, mundatus a lepra intercessione Silvestri tunc summi Pontificis, Imperii sedem, scilicet Romam, donavit Ecclesie cum multis aliis Imperii dignitatibus. Ex quo arguunt dignitates illas deinde neminem assummere posse nisi ab Ecclesia recipiat, cuius eas esse dicunt; et ex hoc bene sequeretur auctoritatem unam ab alia dependere, ut ipsi volunt” (Monarchia 3.10.1). 67 “Constantinus alienare non poterat Imperii dignitatem, nec Ecclesia recipere” (Monarchia 3.10.4). 68 “nemini licet ea facere per offitium sibi deputatum que sunt contra illud offitium” (Monarchia 3.10.5). 69 “The whole of the argument which follows will therefore be addressed to those people who assert that the authority of the empire is dependent on the authority of the church in the same way as a builder is dependent on the architect. They are influenced by a number of different arguments, which they draw from the holy Scriptures and from certain actions both of the supreme Pontiff and the emperor himself; but they seek to have some support from reason on their side as well. Firstly they say, basing themselves on Genesis, that God created ‘two great lights’—a greater light and a lesser light—so that one might rule the day and the other rule the night; these they took in an allegorical sense to mean the two powers, i.e. the spiritual and the temporal. Then they go on to argue that, just as the moon, which is the lesser light, has no light except that which it receives from the sun, in the same way the temporal power has no authority except that which it receives from the spiritual power.” “Isti vero ad quos erit tota disputatio sequens, asserentes auctoritatem Imperii ab auctoritate Ecclesie dependere velut artifex inferior dependet ab architecto, pluribus et diversis argumentis moventur;

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que quidem de Sacra Scriptura eliciunt et de quibusdam gestis tam summi Pontificis quam ipsius Imperatoris, nonnullam vero rationis indicium habere nituntur. Dicunt enim primo, secundum scripturam Geneseos, quod Deus fecit duo magna luminaria—luminare maius et luminare minus—ut alterum preesset diei et alterum preesset nocti: que allegorice dicta esse intelligebant ista duo regimina: scilicet spirituale et temporale” (Monarchia 3.4.1–3). 70 For discussions of the “two great lights,” see Nardi, “Intorno ad una nuova interpretazione del terzo libro della Monarchia dantesca,” 185–207; Ernst H. Kantowicz, “Dante’s ‘Two Suns,’ ’’ in Semitic and Oriental Studies Presented to William Popper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 217–31; Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy, 86–90; Anthony K. Cassell, “ ‘Luna est Ecclesia’: Dante and the ‘Two Great Lights,’ ’’ Dante Studies 119 (2001), 1–26. 71 See Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 239–40, for Dante and the fallacious arguments in the allegorical readings of the “sun” and “moon.” 72 “Having made these preliminary observations, with reference to the point made earlier I now proceed to refute that claim of theirs that those two lights allegorically signify these two kinds of power. The whole force of their argument lies in this claim. That this interpretation is completely untenable can be demonstrated in two ways. Firstly, given that these two kinds of power are accidental properties of man, God would seem to have perverted the natural order by producing accidents before their subject, which is an absurd claim to make about God; for those two lights were created on the fourth day and man on the sixth, as is clear from the Bible. Further, given that those two powers guide men towards certain ends, as we shall see presently, if man had remained in the state of innocence in which he was created by God, he would have had no need of such guidance; such powers are thus remedies for the infirmity of sin. Therefore since on the fourth day man was not only not a sinner but he did not even exist, it would have been pointless to produce remedies; and this is against divine goodness . . . It therefore cannot be maintained that on the fourth day God created these two powers.” “Hiis itaque prenotatis, ad id quod superius dicebatur dico per interemptionem illius dicit quo dicunt illa duo luminaria typice importare duo hec regimina: in quo quidem dicto tota vis argumenti consistit. Quod autem ille sensus omnino sustineri non possit, duplici via potest ostendi. Primo quia, cum huiusmodi regimina sint accidentia quedam ipsius hominis, videretur Deus usus fuisse ordine perverso accidentia prius producendo quam proprium subiectum: quod absurdum est dicere de Deo:

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Notes nam illa duo luminaria producta sunt die quarto et homo die sexto, ut patet in Lictera. Preterea, cum ista regimina sint hominum directiva in quosdam fines, ut infra patebit, si homo stetisset in statu innocentie in quo a Deo factus est, talibus directivis non indiguisset: sunt ergo huiusmodi regimina remedia contra infirmitatem peccati. Cum ergo non solum in die quarto peccator homo non erat, sed etiam simpliciter homo non erat, producere remedia fuisset otiosum: quod est contra divinam bonitatem. . . Non igitur dicendum est quod quarto die Deus hec duo regimina fecerit” (Monarchia 3.4.12–16).

73 See Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy, 86–9. 74 “Sic ergo dico quod regnum temporale non recipit esse a spirituali, nec virtutem que est eius auctoritatis, nec etiam operationem simpliciter; sed bene ab eo recipit ut virtuosius operetur per lucem gratie quam in celo et in terra benedictio summi Pontificis infundit illi. Et ideo argumentum peccabat in forma, quia predicatum in conclusione non est extremitas maioris, ut patet; procedit enim sic: luna recipit lucem a sole qui est regimen spirituale; regimen temporale est luna; ergo regimen temporale recipit auctoritatem a regimine spirituali. . . . in predicato vero conclusionis ‘auctoritatem’: que sunt res diverse subiecto et ratione, ut visum est” (Monarchia 3.4.20–2). 75 “de femore Iacob fluxit figura horum duorum regiminum, quia Levi et Iudas: quorum alter fuit pater sacerdotii, alter vero regiminis temporalis. Deinde sic arguunt ex hiis: sicut se habuit Levi ad Iudam, sic se habet Ecclesia ad Imperium: Levi precessit Iudam in nativitate, ut patet in Lictera: ergo Ecclesia precedit Imperium in auctoritate. Et hoc vero de facili solvitur: nam cum dicunt quod Levi et Iudas, filii Iacob, figurant ista regimina . . . nam aliud est ‘auctoritas’ et aliud ‘nativitas’. . .” (Monarchia 3.5.1–3). 76 “qui vice Dei de precepto fungebatur. . .Et ex hoc arguunt quod, quemadmodum ille Dei vicarius auctoritatem habuit dandi et tollendi regimen temporale et in alium transferendi, sic et nunc Dei vicarius, Ecclesie universalis antistes, auctoritatem habet dandi et tollendi et etiam transferendi sceptrum regiminis temporalis: ex quo sine dubio sequeretur quod auctoritas Imperii dependeret ut dicunt. Et ad hoc dicendum per interemptionem eius quod dicunt Samuelem Dei vicarium, quia non ut vicarius sed ut legatus spetialis ad hoc, sive nuntius portans mandatum Domini expressum . . .” (Monarchia 3.6.1–4). 77 See Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy, 88–9. 78 “ . . . as God’s vicar by his command, [Samuel] . . . And from this they argue that just as he, as God’s vicar, had the authority to give and take away temporal power and transfer it to someone else, so now too God’s vicar, the head of

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the universal church, has the authority to give and to take away and even to transfer the scepter of temporal power; from which it would undoubtedly follow that imperial authority would be dependent in the way they claim. This argument too must be answered by denying their claim that Samuel was God’s vicar, because he acted on that occasion not as vicar but as a special emissary for a particular purpose, that is to say as a messenger bearing God’s express command.” “Ex quo arguunt successorem Petri omnia de concessione Dei posse tam ligare quam solvere; et inde inferunt posse solvere leges et decreta Imperii, atque leges et decreta ligare pro regimine temporali. . .” (Monarchia 3.8.2). 79 “unde arguunt illa duo regimina secundum auctoritatem apud successorem Petri consistere. Et ad hoc dicendum per interemptionem sensus in quo fundant argumentum. Dicunt enim illos duos gladios, quos assignavit Petrus, duo prefata regimina importare” (Monarchia 3.9.1–2). 80 “Sed Ecclesia omnino indisposita erat ad temporalia recipienda per preceptum prohibitivum expressum” (Monarchia 3.10.14). 81 Jerome, “Epistola LIII Sancti Hieronymi ad Paulinum presbyterum,” in Conrad Lindberg, The Middle English Bible: Prefatory Epistles of St. Jerome (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1978), 75–76 (61–167). 82 “Amplius, si Ecclesia virtutem haberet auctorizandi romanum Principem, aut haberet a Deo, aut a se, aut ab Imperatore aliquo aut ab universo mortalium assensu, vel saltem ex illis prevalentium: nulla est alia rimula, per quam virtus hec ad Ecclesiam manare potuisset; sed a nullo istorum habet: ergo virtutem predictam non habet” (Monarchia 3.14.1). 83 Again, informed by ample critical support (e.g. Nardi, Maccarrone, Davis), see Shaw, “Introduction,” Monarchia, xxxiii. See also G. Holmes, “Dante and the Popes,” in The World of Dante. Essays on Dante and his Times, ed. C. Grayson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 18–43.

Chapter 5 1 G.R. Sarolli, “Dante, Scriba Dei,” Convivium 4–6 (1963): 385–422, 513–44, and 641–71. 2 See Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5; also, central Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert; also, closer to my reading is Silvio Pasquazi, All’Eterno dal Tempo: Studi Danteschi (Rome:Bulzoni, 1985; orig. 1966).

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3 See Francesco Mazzoni, Il Canto VI dell’ Inferno (Florence: F. le Monnier, 1967); Ferrante, The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy and Scott, Dante’s Political Purgatory, for the political parallelism in the sixth canto. 4 See Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of Desert, 324–8. 5 Augustine, De Genesis ad litteram libri duodecim, trans., intro. and notes P. Agaësse and A. Solignac, in Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 48 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1972), Book 4.2.2. Also, Geoffroy d’Auxerre and Thibaut de Langres produced two small treatises on numbers in the twelfth century. For both, the number six signifies the “first perfection of a work.” See Maria Picchio Simonelli, “Canto VI: Abject Italy,” in Purgatorio, ed. Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles Ross (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 58. 6 Remo Fasani, “Canto VI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Inferno, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone (Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2000), 91–102. 7 Shaw, Monarchia, xxxviii–xl; Cassell, The Monarchia Controversy, 3–27; Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 230, n.2. 8 Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, 59 9 See Nicolae Iliescu, “The Roman emperors in The Divine Comedy,” Lectura Dantis Newberryana, vol. 1, ed. Paolo Cherchi and Antonio C. Mastrobuono (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 4 (3–18). 10 d’Entrèves, “Dante politico,” in Dante politico e altri saggi, 37–126; see also Peter Hainsworth, “Dante’s Farewell to Politics,” in Dante and Governance, 152–69. 11 Here, I am taking a different position on Dante and Augustine and history than the general consensus. For example, as Mazzotta argues in discussing Paradiso 6, Dante “twists Augustine’s vigorous attack on Rome around; he implies that history enacts typologically the pattern of Exodus,” Dante, Poet of the Desert, 182. 12 See Iliescu, “The Roman emperors in The Divine Comedy,” Lectura Dantis Newberryana, vol. 1, 17. 13 For the most incisive discussion of this, see Edward Peters, “The Failure of Church and Empire: Paradiso 30,” in Limits of Thought and Power in Medieval Europe (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001), 326–35. 14 Ibid., 334–5. 15 See Hainsworth, “Dante’s Farewell to Politics,” in Dante and Governance, 152–69. 16 This is the point made by Mazzoni, Il Canto VI dell’ Inferno, 40–1, 47. The canto has been exhaustively discussed as for example, Uberto Limentani, “Inferno VI,” in Dante’s Comedy: Introductory Readings of Selected Cantos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 18–33; Zygmunt G. Baranski, “Inferno

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VI.73: A Controversy Re-Examined,” Italian Studies 36 (1981), 1–26; Giuliana Angiolillo, “Canto VI: Ciacco,” in La Nuova Frontiera della Tanatologia, vol. 1 Inferno (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1996), 73–7; Angelo Jacomuzzi, “L’Inferno, VI: il praesans aeternitatis” tra memoria e profezia,” in L’Imago al Cerchio e altri studi sulla “Divina Commedia,” (Milan: Francoangeli, 1995), 171–89; Fasani, “Canto VI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis. 17 See Limentani, “Inferno VI,” 28; Baranski, “Inferno VI.73: A Controversy Re-Examined,” 24. 18 Busch, “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for the Afterlife,” Augustine and History, 23–5. 19 Mazzoni, Canto VI dell’ Inferno, 40–1. 20 “Questa è una ragione di ciò; ma più sottilmente pensando, e secondo la infallibile veritade, questo numero fue ella medesima; per similitudine dico, e ciò intendo così. Lo numero del tre è la radice del nove, però che, sanza numero altro alcuno, per se medesimo fa nove, sì come vedemo manifestamente che tre via tre fa nove. Dunque se lo tre è fattore per se medesimo del nove, e lo fattore per se medesimo de li miracoli è tre, cioè Padre e Figlio e Spirito Santo, li quali sono tre e uno, questa donna fue accompagnata da questo numero del nove a dare ad intendere ch’ella era uno nove, cioè uno miracolo, la cui radice, cioè del miracolo, è solamente la mirabile Trinitade” (Vita Nuova 29.3). 21 Again, see Quint, “Repetition and Ideology in the Aeneid,” Epic and Empire, 50–96. 22 Pasquazi, “Il Canto VI del Purgatorio,” in All’ Eterno dal Tempo, 195–211. 23 Ibid., 209; and see also Scott, Dante’s Political Purgatory, 100; also, see note 78 in Singleton, Purgatorio 6, 127. 24 Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 153–73; on Sordello’s planh, see Cesare de Lollis, Vita e poesie di Sordello (Bologna: Forni, 1969); T.G. Bergin, “Dante’s Provençal Gallery,” in A Diversity of Dante (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 87–111; Z. G. Baranski, “Purgatorio VI,” in Dante’s Divine Comedy, ed. T. Wlassics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993), 80–97; Maurizio Perugi, “Il Sordello di Dante e la tradizione mediolatina dell’ invettiva,” in Studi Danteschi 55 (1983), 23–135. 25 Italo Bertelli, “Impeto etico-politico ed umano compianto nel canto VI del Purgatorio,” in Saggi danteschi. Letture, note e interpretazioni (Milan: Bignami, 2006), 25–44; Perugi, “Il Sordello di Dante e la tradizione mediolatina dell’ invettiva”; also, Simonelli, “Canto VI: Abject Italy,” in Purgatorio, ed.

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Notes Mandelbaum, Oldcorn, and Ross, 56–64; Maurizio Perugi, in “Canto VII: Sordello and the Catalog of Princes” points out that the sirventes and the planctus are closely related in contemporary Middle Latin handbooks and are both common to the literary practice of the troubadours. In Purgatorio, ed. Mandelbaum, Oldcorn, and Ross, 72.

26 Scott, Dante’s Political Purgatory, 113–14. 27 See Perugi, “Canto VII: Sordello and the Catalog of Princes,” in Purgatorio, ed. Mandelbaum, Oldcorn, and Ross, 65–72; Scott, “The Sordello Episode,” in Dante’s Political Purgatory, 96–127. 28 Claire E. Honess, “Dante and Political Poetry in the Vernacular,” in Dante and His Literary Precursors, ed. John C. Barnes and Jennifer Petrie (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 138–41. 29 Perugi, “Canto VII: Sordello and the Catalog of Princes,” in Purgatorio, ed. Mandelbaum, Oldcorn, and Ross, 72. 30 Giuliana Angiolillo, “Canto VI: Sordello da Goito,” La Nuova Frontiera della Tanatologia, vol. 2 Purgatorio (Florence: Leo Olschki, 1996), 79–90. 31 “Ac per hoc, si res publica res est populi et populus non est qui consensu non sociatus est iuris, non est autem ius, ubi nulla iustitia est: procul dubio colligitur, ubi iustitia non est, non esse rem publicam.” 32 For example, see Ettore Paratore, “Il canto VI del Paradiso,” in Nuovi Saggi Danteschi (Rome: A. Signorelli, 1973), 163–206; Paolo Brezzi, “Roma Pagana e Christiana nel Pensiero di Dante: Il volo dell’Aquila romana; Paradiso VI,” in Letture Dantesche di Argomento Storico-Politico (Naples: Editrice Ferraro, 1983), 121–52; S. Bellomo, “Contributo all’esegesi di Par. VI,” Italianistica 19 (1990), 9–26; Giuliana Angiolillo, “Canto VI: Giustiniano,” in La Nuova Frontiera della Tanatologia: Le biografie della Commedia, vol. 3 Paradiso (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1996), 33–53; Stefano Carrai, “Canto VI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2002), 95–106. 33 Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert, 180. 34 See Paratore, “Il canto VI del Paradiso,” in Nuovi Saggi Danteschi for a thorough development of these ideas. 35 See Robert Hollander, “Dante’s Republican Treasury,” Dante Studies CIV (1986), 59–82, for Dante’s admiration of the Roman republic. 36 For a full discussion of this idea of providential vendetta, and specifically its application to the persecution of Jews, see Rachel Jacoff, Dante and the Jewish Question (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 2007).

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37 See Carrai, “Canto VI,” in Lectura Dantis Turicensis: Paradiso, 95–106. 38 Angiolillo, La Nuova Frontiera della Tanatologia: Le biografie della Commedia, 33–53. 39 Brezzi, “Roma Pagana e Christiana nel Pensiero di Dante: Il volo dell’Aquila romana; Paradiso VI,” in Letture Dantesche di Argomento Storico-Politico, 121–52. 40 Mazzoni, Canto VI dell’ Inferno; also, see Fernando Figurelli, Il Canto VII dell’ Inferno (Florence: Le Monnier, 1967), 18. 41 On fortune, see Vincenzo Cioffari, The Conception of Fortune and Fate in the Works of Dante (Cambridge, MA: The Dante Society, 1940); Gianluigi Toja, “La Fortuna,” Studi Danteschi 42 (1965), 247–60. 42 Christopher Kleinhenz, “Plutus, Fortune, and Michael: the Eternal Triangle,” Dante Studies 98 (1980), 35–52. 43 G. R. Sarolli, Prolegomena alla Divina Commedia (Florence: Olschki Editore, 1971), 290; again Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert, 326. 44 Figurelli, Il Canto VII d’Inferno, 7. 45 Angiolillo, “Canto VII: Il tema della fortuna,” in La Nuova Frontiera della Tanatologia, vol. 1 Inferno, 80. 46 Angiolillo, “Canto VII: Il tema della fortuna,” in La Nuova Frontiera della Tanatologia, vol. 1 Inferno, 81. 47 Cioffari, The Conception of Fortune and Fate. 48 Again, see Toja, 249–50; Cioffari, 8–9. 49 Mazzotta, “A pattern of Order: Inferno VII and Paradiso VII,” Dante, Poet of the Desert, discusses Augustine’s, Boethius’s and Dante’s notions of Fortune, 319–28. See also Toja, 255–6. 50 “fortuna vero, quae dicitur bona, sine ullo examine meritorum fortuito accidit hominibus et bonis et malis, unde etiam Fortuna nominatur. Quo modo ergo bona est, quae sine ullo iudicio venit et ad bonos et ad malos?” (City of God 4.18.21–5). 51 “. . . Deum dicimus omnia scire antequam fiant, et voluntate nos facere quidquid a nobis nisi volentibus fieri sentimus et novimus. Omnia vero fato fieri non dicimus, immo nulla fieri fato dicimus” (City of God 5.9). 52 Shaw, Dante Monarchia, 86, note 9. 53 “Ordo igitur divinae providentiae exigit quod sit casus et fortuna in rebus,” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans., intro., and notes Vernon J. Bourke (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), Book 3, Chapter 74. See Toja, 259.

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54 Giuliana Angiolillo, “Canto VII: Il Canto dell’ Esilio di Virgilio,” La Nuova Frontiera della Tanatologia, vol. 2 Purgatorio (Florence: Leo Olschki, 1996), 94. 55 Michelangelo Picone, “Canto VII,” in Purgatorio: Lectura Dantis Turicensis, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone (Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2001), 93–107. 56 Ibid., 103. 57 For the connection between the careers of these figures, Italy’s political troubles, and Dante’s rethinking of his imperial politics, see Giorgio Padoan, “Purgatorio VII: Arrigo VII o Federico d’ Asburgo?” in Sotto il Segno di Dante: Scritti in onore di Francesco Mazzoni, ed. Leonello Coglievina and Domenica De Robertis (Florence: Casa Editrice le Lettere, 1998), 225–31. 58 Brezzi, “Romana Pagana e Cristiana nel pensiero di Dante,” 121–52. 59 See, for example, Cesare Galimberti, “Il Canto VII del Paradiso,” Lectura Dantis Scaligera (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968), 217–52; Georges Güntert, “Canto VII,” Paradiso: Lectura Dantis Turicensis, ed. Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2002), 107–17; Jacoff, Dante and the Jewish Question; Christopher Ryan discusses how Anselm differs from Dante, who emphasizes God’s love rather than justice as prompting His free choice, so that the Incarnation was not necessary. See “Paradiso VII: Marking the Difference Between Dante and Anselm,” in Dante and the Middle Ages, ed. John C. Barnes and Cormac Ó Cuilleanán (Dublin: Irish Academic Press: 1995), 117–37. 60 Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert, 324. 61 For an overview of Dante scholars who have agreed that Dante used Anselm’s Cur deus homo as his primary source for this theory of the redemption from A. Agresti (1887), Giorgio Padoan (1965), H. Gmelin (1966–70), Giovanni Reggio (1979), S.F. Di Zenzo (1984), and including F.S. Schmitt’s entry on “Anselmo” in the Enciclopedia Dantesca 1 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970), 293–94, see Ryan, “Paradiso VII,” 117–37. 62 Jacoff, Dante and the Jewish Question, 5. 63 A brief aside on this word “vendetta,” which occurs precisely nine times in Inferno and as pointed out, as a multiple of three (the trinity), is Beatrice’s number: Inf. 7.12, Archangel Michael’s vengeance; Inf. 11.90, “divina vendetta”; Inf. 12.69, Nessus’s vendetta; Inf. 14.16, vendetta of God; Inf. 14.60, Capaneus defies Jove’s vengeance; Inf. 18.96, Medea has her vendetta inflicted on Jason; Inf. 24.120, God’s vendetta on Vanni Fucci; Inf. 26.57, vendetta of God on Diomedes and Ulysses; Inf. 32.80, the treacherous Bocca asking if Dante is increasing the vendetta of the Battle of Montaperti. In all of these cases, justice and vendetta

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are linked, in the sense that both refer to a retributive system, in which a penalty is exacted. In Purgatorio, which remains within the dynamic human dispensation as the souls struggle to overcome their temptations, the word occurs six times. Also in terms of the drama of the poem, we remain within the six ages of the world, with the sixth age beginning with the Incarnation and ending with universal judgment. In these cases, the word vendetta refers to desire for revenge or grief at the suffering due to the just revenge: the story of Trajan when a widow asks for vendetta for the death of her son (Purg. 10.83); in Virgil’s explanation of the economy of purgatory, he explains that distorted love results in a desire for vendetta (Purg. 17.122); Hugh Capet asks for vendetta against the plague of France, his progeny (Purg. 20.47 and Purg. 20.95); Dante grieves at the suffering of the purgatorial sinners experiencing “giusta vendetta” (Purg. 21.6); finally Beatrice speaks of the “vendetta di Dio non teme suppe” (“God’s vengeance [that] fears no hindrance” [Purg. 33.36]). In Paradiso, the word “vendetta” occurs seven times, again the number associated with the completion of creation and with divine harmony. It appears an equally significant three times in canto 6 (Par. 6.90, 92, 93), all three referring to divine vendettas (crucifixion and destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Emperor Titus). In Paradiso 7, it occurs twice, both referring back to Titus’s “giusta vendetta” (“just vengeance” [Par. 7.20, 50]). Of the remaining two uses of the word, one occurs in Paradiso 17.53, when Cacciaguida refers to the vendetta of truth that will reveal Dante’s innocence against those who exiled him. At Paradiso 22.14, the last time the word appears, it refers to “un grido di si alto suono” (“a cry of such deep sound”) of the previous canto (Par. 21.140) that followed Peter Damian’s invective against the contemporary ecclesiastical disorder (Par. 21.121–35), a “grido” that Beatrice identifies with “buon zelo” (“righteous zeal” [Par. 22.9]). As she explains it, if Dante had understood their prayers [the cry] (“i prieghi suoi” [Par. 22.13]), he would know what constitutes divine vendetta (Par. 22.14). 64 See Galimberti, for an analysis of the use of chiasm in the canto. 65 Boethius, Philosophiae Consolatio, ed. Ludovicus Bieler in CCSL 94 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1957), III, Metr. 9, 4–6; see also Singleton, Paradiso, notes 64–6, 139. 66 Mazzotta, Appendix, Dante Poet of the Desert, 325–6. 67 See Ryan, “Paradiso VII,” 122. 68 “Quomodo nos amasti, pater bone, qui filio tuo unico non pepercisti, sed pro nobis inpiis tradidisti eum! Quomodo nos amasti, pro quibus ille non rapinam

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216

Notes arbitratus esse aequalis tibi factus est subditus usque ad mortem cruces” (Confessions 10.43.69.13–16).

69 Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Cosmology and the Kiss of Creation (Paradiso 27–9),” Dante Studies 123 (2005), 14 (1–21); Patrick Boyde, Dante, Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 241–2. 70 Mazzotta, “Cosmology and the Kiss of Creation,” 18.

Conclusion 1 J.M. Coetzee, Youth (London: Penguin, 2003), 39. 2 William of Tyre, A History of the Deeds Done beyond the Sea, trans. Emily Atwater Babcock and A.C. Krey, vol. 2 (New York: Octagon Books, 1976), 370–1. 3 Arab Historians of the Crusades, selected and trans. Francesco Gabrieli; trans. from Italian, E.J. Costello (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1969), 150. 4 Arab Historians of the Crusades, 151–2. 5 The United States Democratic Review 6: 23 (Nov 1839): 426–30. 6 As quoted in Jennifer Nelson, “The Role the Dutch Reformed Church Played in the Rise and Fall of Apartheid,” The Journal of Hate Studies 2:1 (2003), 65. 7 Nelson, “The Role of the Dutch Reformed Church,” 66. 8 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, with an intro. by A.J.P. Taylor (London: Penguin, 1966), 94–5. 9 Francis Fukuyama, “Afterword,” The End of History and the Last Man, 341–2 (341–54). 10 John Winthrop, “We shall be a City upon a Hill,” (1630), in Speeches that Changed the World, compiled by Owen Collins (Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, 1998), 63–5. 11 See Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. 12 Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), 286–7. 13 “A City Upon a Hill: The Spirit of American Exceptionalism,” hosted by Newt and Callista Gingrich, produced by Citizens United Productions, Gingrich Productions, Peace River Company, 2011. 14 Taylor, A Secular Age, 122.

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15 Ibid., 243. 16 Ibid., 266. 17 Ibid., 266. 18 Jean Bodin, Bodin On Sovereignty; Six Books of the Commonwealth, abridged and trans. M.J. Tooley (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), 80. 19 Bodin, Bodin On Sovereignty: Six Books of the Commonwealth, 81. 20 Bodin On Sovereignty, “Introduction,” 26. 21 See John of Salisbury, Policratici I and II, 3.15; 4.1; 8.17. 22 Walter Ullman, Medieval Political Thought (London: Penguin, 1966), 121–3. 23 For Schmitt’s importance to modern political theory and the virtual ignorance of his work in English until recent times, see George Schwab, “Introduction,” to Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. and with an intro. George Schwab, with a new Foreword by Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xxxvii–lii. 24 Tracy B. Strong, “Foreword” to Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, vii. 25 Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. 26 Schwab, “Introduction,” Political Theology, xliv. 27 Schmitt, Political Theology, 8. 28 Ibid., 36. 29 Ibid., 46–7. 30 Taylor, A Secular Age, 735. A similar argument is made by Gil Anidjar in Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), where he writes, “The two terms religious and secular, are therefore not simply masks for one another. Rather, they function together as strategic devices and as mechanisms of obfuscation and self-blinding, doing so in such a way that it remains difficult, if not impossible, to extricate them from each other as if by fiat. Ultimately, their separation would be detrimental to an analytics of the power of the religious/secular divide, an understanding of its strategic and disciplinary operations” (47). 31 Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, ed. and intro. Eduardo Menedieta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 149. 32 Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 56–7. 33 Ibid., 57. 34 Taylor, A Secular Age, 736. 35 Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, 140–69. 36 Ibid., 120.

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Aeneid Corpus Christianorum Series Latina De Doctrina Christiana The Seven Books of History against the Pagans Patrologia Graeca Patrologia Latina Retractiones Sources Chrétiennes

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Scott, John Alan. Dante’s Political Purgatory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Segal, Alan. Paul the Convert: the Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Segal, Charles. “Myth and Philosophy in the Metamorphoses. Ovid’s Augustanism and the Augustan Conclusion of Book XV.” American Journal of Philology 90 (1969): 257–92. Serres, Michel. Rome: Livre des fondations. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1983. Silverstein, Theodore. “On the Genesis of De Monarchia, II, v.” In Dante in America: The First Two Centuries. Ed. A. Bartlett Giamatti. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983. 187–218; orig. pub. Speculum XIII (1938): 326–49. Simonelli, Maria Picchio. “Canto VI: Abject Italy.” In Purgatorio. Ed. Mandelbaum, Oldcorn, and Ross. 56–64. Sistrunk, Timothy G. “Obligations of the Emperor as the Reverent Son in Dante’s Monarchia.” Dante Studies 105 (1987): 95–112. Smalley, Beryl. Historians in the Middle Ages. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1974. — . The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941. Spiegel, Gabrielle Michele. The Past as Text: the Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1992. Stendahl, Krister. “Call Rather than Conversion.” In Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976. 7–13. Stevenson, Jr, William R. Christian Love and Just War: Moral Paradox and Political Life in St. Augustine and His Modern Interpreters. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987. Stock, Brian. “History, Literature, Textuality.” In Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. 16–29. — . Augustine the Reader. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1996. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Theissen, Gerd. The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity. Essays on Corinth. Ed. and trans. John H. Schütz. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975. Tiffou, Étienne. “Salluste et la Géographie.” Romaine et Géographie Historique: Mélanges Offerts à Roger Dion. Paris: Piccard, 1974. 151–60. Toja, Gianluigi. “La Fortuna.” Studi Danteschi 42 (1965): 247–60. Toynbee, Paget. “Dante’s Obligations to the Ormista (The Historiae Adversum Paganos of Orosius).” In Dante Studies and Researches. London: Methuen and Co., 1902. 121–36. Ullman, Walter. Medieval Political Thought. London: Penguin, 1966. Vallone, Aldo. Antidantismo politico nel XIV secolo. Naples: Liguori, 1973.

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Van Oort, Johannes. Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study of Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of His Doctrine of the Two Cities. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991. Vessey, Mark. “The Demise of the Christian Writer and the Remaking of Late Antiquity’: From Henri-Irénée Marrou’s Saint Augustine (1938) to Peter Brown’s Holy Man (1983).” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6.3 (1998): 377–411. Vessey, Mark, Karla Pollman, and Allan D. Fitzgerald. Eds. History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine’s City of God. Proceedings of a colloquium held at Green College, University of British Columbia, September, 1997. Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999. von Rad, Gerhard. The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays. Trans. E. W. T. Dicken. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966. Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Warrior, Valerie M. “Introduction.” Livy, The History of Rome: Books 1–5. Trans, intro. and notes Valerie M. Warrior. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2006. i-xxvi. Westermann, Claus. The Promises to the Fathers: Studies on the Patriarchal Narratives. Trans. David E. Green. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Wetzel, James. Augustine and the Limits of Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. — . The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. White, Peter. Promised Verse. Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Wilken, Robert Louis. The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Williams, Bernard. “What Was Wrong with Minos? Thucydides and Historical Time.” Representations 74 (Spring, 2001): 1–18. — . Truth and Truthfulness. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Winthrop, John. “We shall be a City upon a Hill” (1630). In Speeches that Changed the World. Compiled by Owen Collins. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, 1998. 63–5. Woodward, David. “Medieval Mappaemundi.” In The History of Cartography 1. 286–370.

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Index Agamben, Giorgio 192n. 18 Alighieri, Dante, allegorical interpretative strategies 15–16 Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy 140 Church-State relationships, Bernard’s De Consideratione 103 John’s Policraticus 102–3 Commedia 3, 100 bad fortune 129–30 Beatrice’s speech 144–54 bontà 150 boundless divine goodness 139, 148–50, 154, 207n. 72 Florence 128–31 fortune 137–42 gambling 130 giusto 129 Inferno 6 128–30 Inferno 7 137–42 Italy 132–3 Justinian Empire 133–5 Paradiso 6 132–5 Paradiso 7 144–54 Paradiso 30 126–8 provedenza 124–5 Purgatorio 6 130–2 Purgatorio 7 142–4 s’addua and s’indonna 151 scriba dei 121 seventh cantos 137–54 six and seven, poetic revelation 122–3 sixth cantos 128–36 story of Romeo 136 sub specie eternitatis 124, 135 temporal and ecclesiastical order, corruption of 126–7 vendetta 145 widowed and alone, Rome 131

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Convivio 3, 99, 110, 124, 127, 139 Monarchia 3 Aeneas 111 allegorical interpretation 118–19 auctoritas 101–2 Bodin-like theory, divine authority 167 breast-plate of faith 114 civic unity 97 evangelium and imperium 109, 113 Henry VII 102 Inferno 2 110 Inferno 19 115, 193n. 21 Prue Shaw’s dating 100 Psalm 132 (133) 97 Roman Empire 106–7, 111–12 Rome 98 scriptures, misuse of 104 separation of powers, argument for 111 temporal monarchy 106 two great lights 116 universal temporal community 99 Thomism 102 American expansionism 2 Anderson, Perry, A Zone of Engagement 170n. 7, 175n. 2 Angiolillo, Giuliana 211nn. 16, 212n. 30, 32, 213nn. 38, 45–6, 214n. 54 Anidjar, Gil, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature 217n. 30 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles 167, 213n. 53 Arendt, Hannah, Love and Saint Augustine 89 Armour, Peter 170n. 6, 186n. 40 Ascoli, Albert Russell 104, 171nn. 13, 15, 175n. 65, 201nn. 14–15, 17, 19, 203n. 37, 205n. 56, 210nn. 7–8

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Index

Auerbach, Erich 10, 174n. 44, 175n. 63, 191n. 2 Augustine, allegorical interpretative strategies 14 authoritative resource 5–6 City of God 2–3, 54, 129, 135–6, 194nn. 33, 36, 44–5, 195n. 50, 196n. 55, 197nn. 75, 77, 213nn. 50–1 absolute truth, Christian dispensation 10 Aeneid 74 allegorical reading 14–15 apocalyptic history 75–6 Babylon 48 Book 5 133 Carthage, destruction of 88 Church 73–4 Cicero 33, 87 city of man 8 civitas 77 civitatem mundi 81 commonwealth 132 community of saints 127 conscience 92 Dante’s Monarchia 108–12 divine love 79 earthly city vs heavenly city 144 Fortune 140, 142 geography 80 historical assumptions, Roman Empire 7 historicam rationem 75 history 7–8 horror of war 108 India 82 Jerusalem 68, 83–6 mystical sense of texts 101 vs Orosius’ History 57 Platonic and Stoic views 89 preface to 17 religious convictions 162 revelation 92 saeculum 75, 162–7 Sallust 87–8 scientia and sapientia 92–3 secularism and political realism 162 seventh day 122–3

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two cities, symbolic concept of 76 Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue 78 Confessions 5, 90, 96, 138, 200n. 3 Cicero 32 divine love, role of 149 intellectual development 75 Virgil 15 De Doctrina Christiana 10, 14, 23, 77, 101, 118 Aune, David E. 182n. 81 Baranski, Zygmunt G., Purgatorio VI 211n. 24 Barbi, Michele 170n. 6 Bardy, Gustave 191n. 5 Barnes, Timothy David, Constantine and Eusebius 183n. 6, 184n. 13 Barolini, Teodolinda 211n. 24 Bately, Janet M. 187n. 50 Bellomo, Saverio 212n. 32 Benfell, V. Stanley, The Biblical Dante 175n. 63, 205n. 60 Benjamin, Walter, concept of history 75–6, 192n. 14, 199n. 95 Benko, Stephen 188n. 57 Bernard of Clairveaux, De Consideratione 103 Bertelli, Italo 211n. 25 the Bible, authoritative role 4 Hebrew 6, 8, 11, 14–16, 42, 46, 48, 54, 60, 68, 75, 84, 98, 114, 142, 166 authoritative texts 21–3 Book of Joshua 29–30 Davidic dynasty 26–7 destined lands 21 Deuteronomy 24, 29–30 divine promise, patriarchs 24–5 educational history 23–4 epochal history 23 fulfillment 12 Genesis 24–5, 28 Isaiah 27–8 Israelite history 25–31 Jewish Antiquities 43–4 literal readings 23

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Index Nehemiah 31 Numbers 30 Psalm 104 (105) 22 Psalm 134 (135) 31 reading/interpretive practices 21–2 reception 12 New Testament 12, 14, 26, 68, 79, 95, 114, 117, 156, 163, 165, 168 Apocalypse of John 47–9 cleansing of the temple 45–6 earthly city vs heavenly city 68 inner biblical exegesis 14 Isaiah 48–9 Jewish Antiquities 43–4 The Jewish War 44–5 Luke and Luke-Acts 46–7 temple 49 Black, Antony 172n. 22, 177nn. 30–1, 184n. 12, 203n. 44 Bloom, Harold, fulfillment 12, 14, 174nn. 52–3 Bodin, Jean, Bodin On Sovereignty; Six Books of the Commonwealth 163 Boniface VIII, Clericis laicos 104 Unam sanctam 103–4 Botterill, Steven 202n. 27 Boyarin, Daniel, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity 174n. 58 Brezzi, Paolo 212n. 32, 213n. 39, 214n. 58 Brown, Peter, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire 94, 199n. 107 Bultmann, Rudolf 181n. 70 Burrus, Virginia 199n. 96 Busch, Peter 191n. 8, 197n. 73, 211n. 18 Cameron, Averil, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire 199n. 99 Campbell, Mary Baine 195n. 45 Capitani, Ovidio 202n. 23 Carletti, Gabrielle 201n. 21 Carrai, Stefano, Canto VI 212n. 32, 213n. 37

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241

Cassell, Anthony K., The Monarchia Controversy 201n. 11, 202nn. 32, 35, 205n. 52, 207n. 70, 208nn. 73, 77, 210n. 7 Chartier, Roger 171n. 12 Chydenius, Johan 176nn. 6, 8, 10, 177n. 23, 185n. 26, 190n. 73, 194n. 34 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De Natura Deorum 87, 90, 196n. 70 De Oratore 173n. 41 De Re Publica 32, 87, 177nn. 28, 31, 178n. 35 Tusculan Disputations 87, 196n. 70 Cioffari, Vincenzo 213nn. 41, 47 Clement V, Pastoralis cura 104 Clements, Ronald Ernest, Abraham and David 176n. 17, 177n. 18 Cochrane, Charles Norris, Christianity and Classical Culture 92 Coetzee, John Maxwell, Youth 155 Collingwood, Robin George, The Idea of History 1, 9, 169nn. 1, 5, 173n. 33 Conte, Gian Biagio 180n. 52 Courcelle, Pierre 172n. 17, 177n. 32, 184n. 18 Davies, William David, The Gospel and the Land 25 Davis, Charles T. 97, 102, 105, 170n. 6, 186n. 40, 200nn. 1, 3, 5, 201nn. 22–3, 203nn. 36, 38, 45, 205n. 53 De Matteis, Maria Consiglia 202n. 23 Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology 191n. 2 Di Scipio, Giuseppe, Dante and Politics 170n. 6, 202n. 23, 205n. 57 Digeser, Elizabeth DePalma 183n. 6, 184n. 15 Drake, Harold Allen, Constantine and the Bishops 56, 183n. 88, 184n. 13, 185n. 23 Dubois, Pierre, De Recuperatione Terre Sancte 107, 202n. 31, 203n. 44

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242

Index

Dyson, Robert William, The Pilgrim City 191n. 7, 203n. 44 Eagleton, Terry, Reason, Faith, and Revolution 166, 217n. 32 Elliott, John Huxtable, Home for the Homeless 182n. 83 Elshtain, Jean Bethke 196n. 58 epochality 19–20, 31–2, 95, 169n. 4 Fasani, Remo, Canto VI 210n. 6, 211n. 16 Figurelli, Fernando 213nn. 40, 44 Fishbane, Michael, inner biblical exegesis 14, 175n. 60, 176nn. 7, 9 Flamant, Jacques 177n. 32 Foucault, Michel 7, 9, 171n. 12, 172n. 24, 173n. 31 Foulechat, Denis 202n. 24 Franke, William 188n. 57 Fredriksen, Paula, Augustine and the Jews 195n. 49 Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man 19, 160 Gabrieli, Francesco 216n. 3 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method 8, 12, 171n. 11, 173n. 27, 174n. 55 Galimberti, Cesare 214n. 59, 215n. 64 Gerosa, Pietro Paolo 172n. 17 Gottwald, Norman K., The Hebrew Bible 177n. 21 Guerini da Lanciza, Giovanni 185n. 35 Habermas, Jürgen, Religion and Rationality 165, 217n. 31 Hagendahl, Harald 173n. 43, 196n. 63 Hardie, Philip, Virgil and Tragedy 181n. 68 Harding, Brian, Augustine and Roman Virtue 191n. 8, 196nn. 66, 68 the Hebrew Bible 6, 8, 11, 14–16, 42, 46, 48, 54, 60, 68, 75, 84, 98, 114, 142, 166

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authoritative texts 21–3 Book of Joshua 29–30 Davidic dynasty 26–7 destined lands 21 Deuteronomy 24, 29–30 divine promise, patriarchs 24–5 educational history 23–4 epochal history 23 fulfillment 12 Genesis 24–5, 28 Isaiah 27–8 Israelite history 25–31 Jewish Antiquities 43–4 literal readings 23 Nehemiah 31 Numbers 30 Psalm 104 (105) 22 Psalm 134 (135) 31 reading/interpretive practices 21–2 reception 12 Hollander, John, The Figure of Echo 174n. 51, 212n. 35 Holmes, George 201n. 11, 209n. 83 holy land 83, 156–7 Hunt, Edgar D. 185n. 27, 195n. 47 Iliescu, Nicolae 210nn. 9, 12 Inferno 6 128–30, 132, 135 bad fortune 129–30 Inferno 7 137–43, 146, 150 fortune 137–42 Inferno 19 115, 193n. 21 Inglebert, Hervé 184nn. 7, 11, 190n. 72, 196n. 64, 197n. 80 insurrection of subjugated knowledge 7 Jacoff, Rachel 145, 212n. 36, 214nn. 59, 62 Jacomuzzi, Angelo 211n. 16 James of Viterbo, De regimine Christiano 107, 203n. 44 Jameson, Fredric, end of history 19, 169n. 4, 175n. 3 Janvier, Yves 187n. 48, 50 Jauss, Hans Robert 175n. 64 John of Salisbury, Policraticus 102–3, 163 Johnson, Chalmers 161, 216n. 12 Jordan, Mark D. 191n. 2

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Index Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 43–4 The Jewish War 44 Kampowski, Stephan 197n. 79 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 170n. 6, 186n. 40 Kaufman, Peter Iver 198n. 87 Kennedy, George 191n. 2 Kermode, Frank 176n. 11 Kleiner, John 195n. 45 Kleinhenz, Christopher 213n. 42 Lacroix, Benoit 185nn. 29, 31 Lactantius, Divine Institutions 54 Lavere, George J., “The Political Realism of Saint Augustine” 90, 197n. 81, 198n. 86 Le Goff, Jacques 186n. 38, 188n. 55 Leclerq, Jean 202n. 23 Lettieri, Gaetano 199n. 105 Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 6, 8, 15, 21, 77, 189n. 65 Christianity 74 city of Rome 59, 62–3 educational history 38 epochality 32 fated foundation of the city 39 Lucan’s Pharsalia 41–2 Macedonian Empire 40–1 Orosius’ historical theory 59 Maccarone, Michele 170n. 6 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio 3, 10, 32, 174n. 45 Marx, Karl, Communist Manifesto 159 Masseron, Alexandre, Dante et Saint Bernard 202n. 28 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, Cosmology and the Kiss of Creation 216n. 69–70 Dante, Poet of the Desert 133, 144, 148–9, 153, 170n. 6, 172n. 17, 175n. 68, 209n. 2, 210nn. 4, 11, 212n. 33, 213nn. 43, 49, 214n. 60, 215n. 66

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243

Meeks, Wayne 182n. 82 Minnis, Alastair J., Medieval Theory of Authorship 171n. 13 Moevs, Christian, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy 209n. 2 Nardi, Bruno 169n. 6, 186n. 40, 200n. 7, 205n. 57, 206n. 65, 207n. 70 Nelson, Jennifer 216n. 6–7 Neusner, Jacob 175n. 60, 176n. 11 New Testament 12, 14, 26, 68, 79, 95, 114, 117, 156, 163, 165, 168 Apocalypse of John 47–9 cleansing of the temple 45–6 earthly city vs heavenly city 68 inner biblical exegesis 14 Isaiah 48–9 Jewish Antiquities 43–4 The Jewish War 44–5 Luke and Luke-Acts 46–7 temple 49 Niebuhr, Reinhold, Augustine’s Political Realism 94, 97, 199n. 108, 200n. 4, 204n. 46 Nock, Arthur Darby 199n. 101 Nolhac, Pierre de 172n. 17 Ong, Walter Jackson, Orality and Literacy 173n. 32 Origen, De Principiis 90 Orosius, vs Augustine 2, 57–8 authoritative resource 6 Christian belief, Incarnation and redemption 56 Eusebius and Lactantius, Constantine’s victory 53–4 imperium and evangelium 53–4 Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue 55–6 features, historical theory 59 fundamentals, historical theory 51 geographical universalism, Macrobius’ zonal theory 61 Rome 60–1 T-O mappaemundi 61 History against the Pagans 1, 54

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244

Index

Augustinian Christian 71 Babylonian Semiramis’ history 64–5 before and after the city’s beginnings 62 Christian geo-history 72 Christian religion, guidance of 70–1 Christianorum caput 53 Daniel’s interpretation 51 divine discipline 63–4 human intemperance 51 human intransigence 69–70 Jerome’s and Hippolytus’ commentaries 52 Jerusalem 68–9 Macedonian Alexander’s history 65–6 Rome’s failures 66–8 studia 6 O’Sullivan, John L., Democratic Review 157–8 Ovid 15, 114, 181n. 68, 189n. 65 Padoan, Giorgio 214n. 57 Paradiso 6 129, 131–5, 145, 147 Justinian Empire 133–5 sub specie eternitatis 135 Paradiso 7 129, 136–7, 139, 144–54, 215n. 63 bontà 150 boundless divine goodness 148–50, 154 s’addua and s’indonna 151 vendetta 145 Paratore, Ettore 212n. 32, 34 Parry, Adam 38, 180n. 53 Partner, Peter 176n. 13 Paschoud, François 191nn. 7–8, 193n. 28, 196n. 67, 197n. 82, 199n. 97 Pasquazi, Silvio 209n. 2, 211n. 22 Perler, Othmar 195n. 46 Pertile, Lino 98, 200n. 6 Perugi, Maurizio 132, 211nn. 24–5, 212n. 27, 29 Peters, Edward 127, 210n. 13 Pézard, André 202n. 25 Phillips, Oliver 197n. 76

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Picone, Michelangelo, Canto VII 143, 214n. 55 Plato, Timaeus 90 Polanyi, Michael 171n. 11 Polichetti, Antonio 184n. 7, 186n. 46 Pollmann, Karla 194n. 42 Purgatorio 6 130–2 gambling 130, 135 widowed and alone, Rome 131 Purgatorio 7 142–4 Putnam, Michael C. J. 181n. 68 Quint, David, Epic and Empire 42, 178n. 41, 181n. 68–9 Raffa, Guy P. 177n. 31 Renucci, Paul 169n. 6 Resseguie, James L., The Revelation of John 47, 182n. 80 Ricoeur, Paul, allegorical interpretative strategies 13 Time and Narrative 7, 11, 172n. 25, 174n. 47, 184n. 10 Rist, John M. 79, 91, 172n. 17, 191nn. 1–2, 192n. 10, 193n. 32, 198n. 91 Romm, James 189n. 65 Rorty, Richard 173n. 40 Rosenberg, David and Harold Bloom, The Book of J 174n. 54 Rosenthal, Franz 185n. 34 Ryan, Christopher, Paradiso VII 148, 214nn. 59, 61, 215n. 67 Sallust, War with Jugurtha 61, 88 Sanders, E. P., Paul and Palestinian Judaism 182n. 76 Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology 164, 217n. 23, 25, 27 Scott, John Alan 110, 170n. 6, 186n. 40, 202n. 23, 205n. 52, 210n. 3, 211n. 23, 212n. 26

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Index Segal, Alan, Paul the Convert 182n. 74 Serres, Michel, Rome: Livre des fondations 39, 67, 174n. 48, 180n. 59, 190n. 69 Smalley, Beryl, Historians in the Middle Ages 186n. 41 Steiner, George 174n. 50 Stendahl, Krister 182n. 74 Stock, Brian 7, 14–15, 84, 92, 172nn. 17, 26, 174nn. 57, 59, 175n. 62, 191n. 2, 195n. 53, 196n. 57, 199n. 101–2 taken for granted 2, 4–5, 9, 42, 54, 170n. 7 Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age 162, 165, 170n. 7, 171n. 10, 216n. 14, 217nn. 30, 34 Theissen, Gerd 181n. 72, 182nn. 72, 82 Tiffou, Étienne 187n. 51 Toja, Gianluigi 213n. 41 Toynbee, Paget 186n. 39 Ullman, Walter, Medieval Political Thought 217n. 22 Vallone, Aldo 201n. 20, 204n. 48 Van Oort, Johannes, Jerusalem and Babylon 77, 185n. 22, 192n. 9, 193nn. 22, 24, 196n. 61 Vernani, Guido 102, 201n. 20 Vessey, Mark 192n. 13 Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Historiale 59, 172n. 20 Virgil, The Aeneid, according to the flesh 14–15

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Book 2 34 Book 6 35 Book 8 36 destiny 33–4 future of Rome 36 historical reality, complexity of 38 land of the dead 35 private voice of mourning 13 von Rad, Gerhard 176n. 14 Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England 216n. 11 Warrior, Valerie M. 180n. 60, 181n. 65 Westermann, Claus 176n. 15 Wetzel, James, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue 192n. 10 White, Hayden, Metahistory 7, 169n. 1, 171n. 12, 172n. 23, 173n. 40 White, Peter, Promised Verse. Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome 179n. 49 Wilken, Robert Louis 176n. 14 Williams, Bernard, “What Was Wrong with Minos? Thucydides and Historical Time” 9, 173nn. 35–6 Winthrop, John, “We shall be a City upon a Hill” 160, 216n. 10 Woodward, David, Medieval Mappaemundi 177nn. 33–4, 187nn. 47, 49

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