“Enlightened by the Light of Paternal Grace”: Understanding Dante’s Views on Church-State Relations, Part I
The following is a guest submission by Dr. Daniel T. L. Moore.
The relationship between the Church and State in the course of the history of Western Civilization is one of the most fiercely controversial topics and debates. Many opinions have circulated throughout the years since the Church was established by Christ, reaching as far back as St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Bede the Venerable and even discussed among heretical and secular philosophers like Martin Luther, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson. But one author who has been discussed amongst scholars yet has not received as much notable credit is the famous medieval poet and Catholic Durante Alighieri, or, as posterity more famously calls him, Dante. He seems like a very unlikely candidate for such a political conversation, since his most eminent work was and is The Divine Comedy, a poetic prose that describes his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Nevertheless, Dante was a political philosopher as well as poet and one of the topics he tackled with during his time was Church-State relations.
Even though historians have greatly dissected his views on Church-State relations, Dante is often misunderstood in how he viewed the relations between the secular powers and the ecclesiastical powers. They are often misinterpreted as a separation between Church and State, a theory that such men like Jefferson and John Locke upheld, instead of Dante’s views being shown for what he said they were. This is not to say that Dante held to a totally correct view on what the Church teaches should be the relationship between the Church and State, considering that Dante’s political treatise Monarchy, (which will be the subject of this article), was placed in the Index of Forbidden Books in 1585.[1] Nevertheless, Dante did not uphold an Enlightenment viewpoint of Church-State relations, much less a modernist view on the subject. Thus, by presenting his own words and philosophers before him, one can see that Dante believed that the Church and State had their own invested powers granted to them by God but that the State was not totally separated from the Church’s divine authority granted to it by Christ.[2] Before diving into this thesis, however, one must have a firm grasp of who Dante was.
Dante was born in the flourishing city of Florence, Italy, in late May 1265 to a family of low noble birth.[3] Dante hardly discussed his life, especially very important aspects of it, for, even though historians do know that he got married and fathered around three to four children, Dante never mentioned them in his works.[4] By the year 1302, Dante was in exile, a sentence given out by the authorities of Florence who were his political rivals, and lived outside of the city for the rest of his life.[5] It was while he lived in exile that Dante wrote two of his most famous works: Monarchy, written either in 1308, 1312-1313, or 1317-1318, and The Divine Comedy, completed before 1320 and a year before Dante passed away in mid September 1321 in Ravenna, Italy.[6] From these famous works, and the letters he wrote, one can see his views of what he believed to be the proper relations between the Church and State.
A clear glimpse into Dante’s views on Church and State is best found in Monarchy and the letters he wrote to political officials, churchmen, and friends. Dante set forth to answer three key points in Monarchy, which related specifically to the State, the State being the Holy Roman Empire.[7] For the purpose of this article, his third point will be given full attention rather than all three. Dante argued the issue of proving that it could be verified that a “Monarch’s authority derive[d] directly from God or through some intermediary,” the “intermediary” being the Bishop of Rome, the pope.[8] This was in direct contention against other medievalists who argued that secular governments were reliant upon the papacy, and ultimately the Church as a whole, for governmental purposes as well as spiritual.[9]
William Caferro illustrates this papal and Church power during Dante’s lifetime by arguing that the papacy carried on its claim that it possessed the right “to intervene in disputed imperial elections” of the Holy Roman Empire.[10] The papacy also contended against the Holy Roman Empire over regions in Italy that were owned by each party, with the papacy extending its power through utilization of “merchants…[in the] markets and [by] collect[ing] debts.”[11] Additionally, Pope John XXII issued a bull around the years 1316 to 1317 that commanded that no one, unless they received authorization from the Papal See, was to become the next Holy Roman Emperor with the punishment of breaking this command being excommunication.[12]
In response to all this, Dante contended that secular governments, in this case monarchial governments, were endowed from God alone, and not from the Bishop of Rome, with the State having powers to rule and institute laws for the citizens of the nation to live by and to follow.[13] He reasoned this argument on the fact that God appointed the Church “to lead mankind to eternal life” and the State “to lead mankind to temporal happiness.”[14] Since the State had the responsibility to help people achieve earthly joy and that its duty coincided with the way in which it runs “with the movements of the heavens,” along with the fact that God was the only One who fashioned all things to work in an orderly manner throughout the entirety of creation, the State needed to look to God in order to be enlightened and carry out “the principles of liberty and peace.”[15] Therefore, for Dante, only God established the State and no one else, considering that the Highest Being and Authority in the whole universe was God.[16] In connection with and in support of this, Dante argued that the Church possessed no “authority of the temporal power” in regards to ruling a nation and so it could not give the State the ability to govern or even take power away from the State.[17] This was further shown when Dante wrote to governmental officials in Florence that the Church and State’s authorities were “independently derived as from one point.”[18]
Historian Joan Ferrante insightfully adds to this by arguing that Dante wanted the papacy to remember that when Christ appointed St. Peter the Apostle, and his successors after him, as protector of “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” and to have the authority to “bind…and…loose” things “on earth” (Matthew 16:19, DR) that it did not mean that current popes could apply that principle to break up “marriages,” forgive the sins of sinners who did not repent, and to nullify the laws passed by secular governments.[19] One can see this when Dante himself elaborated on this more in The Divine Comedy when he wrote St. Peter proclaiming in Heaven that the Church was not for its clergymen to use in order to gain riches, to uphold some people while being disdainful towards others, or to utilize “the keys” of Heaven as an “emblem” to war against fellow Christians.[20] Dante rebuked the way in which the Church exercised its power towards the State and that it needed to cleanse itself from what God had not authorized it to perform.[21]
[1] “Dante,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, Vol. II, ed. Michael Gagarin, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010).
[2] Dante (Durante) Alighieri, Monarchy and Three Political Letters, trans. Donald Nicholl and Colin Hardy, (London, UK: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954), 94.
[3] Lino Pertile, “Chapter 27: Life,” in Dante in Context, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Press University, 2015), 461.
[4] Ibid, 462.
[5] Ibid, 466.
[6] Pertile, “Chapter 27: Life,” 474. Lino Pertile, “Chapter 28: Works,” in Dante in Context, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Press University, 2015), 488.
[7] Dante, Monarchy and Three Political Letters, 94.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Dante, Monarchy and Three Political Letters, 67.
[10] William Caferro, “Chapter 1: Empire, Italy, and Florence,” in Dante in Context, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 10, 11.
[11] Ibid, 11.
[12] Pope John XXII, Pope John XXII’s Bull, Si fratrum. A Warning Lest Anyone Dare to Assume the Title of Imperial Vicar When the Empire Is Left Vacant. In 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, by Anthony K. Cassell, (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 199.
[13] Ibid, 91.
[14] Ibid, 93.
[15] Dante, Monarchy and Three Political Letters, 93.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid, 89.
[18] Dante, “Letter V,” in Monarchy and Three Political Letters, trans. Donald Nicholl and Colin Hardy, (London, UK: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954), 99.
[19] Joan M. Ferrante, “Chapter Two: Church and State in the Comedy,” in The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 104, 105.
[20] Dante, The Divine Comedy, (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2012), 449.
[21] Ferrante, “Chapter Two: Church and State in the Comedy,” 131.
Dr. Daniel T. L. Moore earned his B.S. in History (2019), M.A. in History (2021), and Ph.D. in History (2025) from Liberty University. During his Ph.D. studies, he converted from Reformed Protestantism to Catholicism, along with his seven living siblings, instrumentally being brought in by their father who reverted to the faith. His dissertation is titled “‘Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam: The Religious and Political Missions of the American-Catholic Military Chaplaincy during the Mexican-American War,” which will be taken and published as his first book. He also runs a scholarly YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@TheSt.BedeCenter), Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/thestbedecenter/), and Substack account (https://substack.com/@thestbedecenter), named The St. Bede Center, where he posts Catholic and Catholic-related history content for academics and history buffs to learn and enjoy alike. He is also a freelance writer for 1Peter5, with his first article to be published this April, a history teacher for Scholè Academy, and a freelance editor for Arouca Press. He lives in North Carolina with his large family.
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