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Dante's De Monarchia is usually treated by the commentators as a mere footnote to the Commedia; and this subordination is justifiable because the poet in Dante overwhelms all other expressions of his genius and also because the Commedia contains much political philosophy, some of which De Monarchia elucidates. But De Monarchia, considered by itself, is a work of great importance. Even if by some unthinkable accident the Commedia had been lost and De Monarchia had survived, it would remain a significant treatise on the state and the papacy and would deserve to be regarded as we regard the political writings of philosophers from Plato to Hobbes. To be sure, the chief interest of the work for us lies in the fact that Dante wrote it, and it would lose some of its value if it were isolated from the rest of his thought; the amazing unity of his mind and the coherence of his purpose make a piecemeal view of any part of him essentially false. His vision of earth and heaven has a thousand aspects but no fragments. Even the unfinished works, Il Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia, are not fragments but are rather to be read as partial manifestations of a singular and consistent plan.

De Monarchia is a vision of earthly well-being. It is an argument, prosaic and heavy in the English translations and very difficult in the original, I should suppose, even to an excellent Latin scholar. But the argument embodies a dream of the greatest of dreamers. The first part sets forth the necessity of empire. Only under a single world-governing monarch are possible the solidarity of mankind and the fullest possible development of the human spirit. In unity man can find peace and justice. Man is made in the image of God, and God is one; wherefore man in imitation of God must make the secular world conform to the universe and set up a unique earthly dominion. In the nature of things empire is divinely ordained and this is further proved by the fact that Christ willed to be born under the Emperor Augustus.

The second part seeks to show that the Roman empire was appointed by God to rule the world. It was established by the aid of miracles, which confirm it as especially created by the will of God. Christ died under the empire; if the empire had not been the rightful temporal authority, Christ would have been punished by the agent of an unjust power, his suffering would have been unlawful and therefore the sin of Adam would not have been duly expiated. Rome was born to command, because it did, in point of fact, conquer the world, and also because the histories of its many heroes and patriots show that the Roman citizen loved right and justice.

The third part is an argument for the separation of church and state, which are independent authorities both deriving directly from God. Many false arguments for the temporal power of the church are refuted. Though the emperor, as a man, is the first son of the church and should obey it like other Christians, yet as emperor he owes allegiance only to God, whom he represents on earth in temporal matters as the pope represents God in spiritual matters. The very nature of the church, its essential spiritual function, forbids it the possession of temporal power.

Have we here, then, nothing but a defence of an empire that has been dust these many centuries, and stale scholastic arguments for the separation of church and state, a long settled question in theoretic politics and practically settled in most countries? There is much more than that in De Monarchia even for the most confident modern democrat, who may regard emperor and pope as twin tyrants and for whom the word "mediæval" has derogatory connotations. It is true that the empire under which Dante actually lived is dead as the empire of the Caesars and that the empire of Dante's dream was never realized in the workaday world. As a political pamphlet De Monarchia is obsolete without even the persistent contemporaneity of some eighteenth century tracts. In a sense Dante's treatise died at birth. Bryce, who gives an excellent summary of it in his "Holy Roman Empire," shows that this plea for empire, conceived by the supreme mind of the age, was the epitaph of the existing empire. It was, indeed, a swan-song, not of the author, who was still to take us to Paradise and put his dream in lovelier form, but of empire in the Catholic Christian sense of "holy." The empire that persisted after the thirteenth century grew further and further away not only from a poet's dream but from any practical possibility of united political authority. The solidarity of mankind was not to be achieved through Rome or Christ, and Dante was not, as he thought, announcing a new era, but summing up a passing era.

But the truth of a dream inheres in the dream itself and is measured only in a secondary way by the course of events. De Monarchia has for us at least the value of a pacifist tract, the noble core of which is not obscured by the strangeness of some of the reasoning or by the destruction of Dante's political milieu. Like some other pacifist documents it is the work of an aggressive militant mind. Dante had lived and suffered in a world continuously at war. The contesting powers, great and small, were so complicated that the historian has difficulty in keeping them clear. To the major quarrels between church and state and the strife of the city-republics with one or the other or both were added an internal warfare between economic classes and feuds between castes and families, all hopelessly intricate.

In this bloody confusion Dante had played the part not of closet philosopher au-dessus de la mêlée, but of soldier and civil official. And to the last he was temperamentally a fighter, though forced by circumstances to drop the sword for the pen. He was not in the eyes of his contemporaries what he has become for us, the supreme solitary genius exiled by an ungrateful city, but was simply one of a thousand members of a beaten party. He was not a pathetic, unappreciated poet but a pertinacious partisan who happened to be on the losing side. He knew war and misery and defeat. Yet his plea for peace is by no means that of a weary belligerent; it is that of a bellicose champion of certain principles. And so, though those principles do not appeal to us and though the expression of them is laborious, even turgid, De Monarchia is still hot with conviction.

The instrument of peace was the one form of government that Dante knew, the empire. Even if his genius had taken the form of vaticination (he was indeed, as it turned out, a poor prophet), he naturally could not in his time have made himself familiar with leagues of nations and Wellsian "world-states." He had to ride on a horse, not in a motor-car. And he rode, as a worldly rider, to a fall. The tragedy of the fall has in it a large element of dramatic irony because he was so splendidly sure of his ideas at exactly the moment when they were least secure.

Dante's conception of an ideal empire had nothing in common with what we now call imperialism, which is mere commercial conquest and can be led by Kaiser or democratic prime minister with equally disastrous results. Dante believed in an imperial headship for the good of all humanity. The ruler of the world was to be the servant of the world, not its master and exploiter; a supreme monarch was to be protected by his lonely authority from the temptations that beset a weak man clothed with limited and contentious authority; aloof from strife and cupidity, having all and so being beyond pride and ambition, he could be a disinterested and just administrator.

The aim of empire is universal peace—Dante begins his argument almost in the terms of Burke and with something like Burke's combination of generosity and elaborate futility—peace, "the best of those things that are ordained for our beatitude." For on peace depends the destiny of mankind to realize the full power of the human mind in thought and deed. Dante's world state is Utopia, compounded, as all Utopias must be, of wisdom and utter impossibilities, of sublime faith and facts half-understood. While he dreamed he did not believe himself a dreamer, any more than did Shelley. He believed intensely in the practical value of his vision, in its originality and its finality as a solution of the problems of the political world. He says that knowledge of monarchy has been shunned because it has no direct relation to profit, and that he will be the first to bring it from obscurity to light for the good of the world and for his own glory. The humble servant and the arrogant doctor at the bedside of the patient! It is one of the most consistent contradictions of proud souls. The reformer has found a new and sure cure and cries "Eureka!"

In spite of the practical failure of his dream, which in a sense defeats him, I do not believe that Dante's pell-mell acceptance of all stories about the greatness of Rome, with no apparent discrimination, is proof that he did not know what he was about. He was making a special plea and he pillaged history and legend to get material for the purposes of his argument. He is a dialectician animated, like all reformers, by unselfish motives, but willing to score a point if he can. We may be fairly sure that Dante was not a credulous person with a childish view of history, but a sophisticated controversialist handling his evidence for effect. Though he mingles fact and fiction and though his documentary resources were more limited than ours, yet he knew perfectly what he was trying to do, and modern attempts to gloss him in a patronizing and apologetic manner are generally mistaken.

There is a grim humour in the fate that overtakes the works of wise men. The treatise which Dante believed would bring peace to a vexed world became a matter of strife. Later Ghibellines used his argument, unfairly, of course, to support the supremacy of the empire over the church, and ecclesiastical authority retorted by condemning the book and even threatening the repose of Dante's bones. A somewhat similar quarrel arose over Hobbes's "Leviathan" three centuries later. Seeking to unite all men, the political philosopher is attacked from both sides, and if he lives he finds that he has poured oil not on troubled waters but on a fire.

Though De Monarchia is much more than a footnote to the Commedia and is worth study for its own sake, yet the unity which it seeks in the world is closely allied to the unity of Dante's celestial vision by which he tried to lead mankind to God. Mankind refused to be cured of its political pains by De Monarchia and even ignored it in spite of Dante's secure and growing fame (there was no English translation until the late nineteenth century). But mankind also never accepted and never will accept the supreme vision of the Commedia. It is a beautiful poem enjoyed by the literary, and even in Italy it is valued, quite properly, as a mere work of art. The world has never paid much attention to Dante's declared purpose to bring mankind through art to God. So that in one way of regarding him, which may perhaps be his way, he failed in the Commedia as he did in De Monarchia. The world of thinking and acting men, whose salvation Dante believed he could work by verse and prose, remains disunited and contentious, weaponed with such bitterness of heart and methods of destruction as the dreamer of Inferno never dreamed.