1. The possibility that the Moslem models of the Divine Comedy may easily have reached Italy and the Florentine poet from Moslem sources having been sufficiently proved, one question alone remains to be answered. Was the mentality of Dante, as revealed in his works, antagonistic to the ready assimilation of these models? For, obviously, no contact, however close, could beget imitation if diversity in language, religion, race, philosophy and art had inspired the Florentine poet with an aversion to the culture of the Arabs. In answer to this question, it may at once be said that all the evidence points to the contrary.
2. In the first place, Dante Alighieri was in matters of learning and literature open to influence from all quarters. Dante students have one and all laid stress upon this mental receptivity. Ozanam repeatedly dwells upon the passionate desire for knowledge that urged on the poet in his search for truth and beauty.[630] D’Ancona has explained how Dante studied and mastered a vast range of subjects; how in his mind inspiration was reconciled with a respect for tradition, and inventive faculty with erudition.[631] Umberto Cosmo, more recently, asserts that in its receptiveness the mind of Dante might be likened to a sea that receives its waters from all parts. Dante, he says, gathered intellectual nourishment from the whole culture of his time, and in his mind were reflected and recast in a new, personal form the sentiments and ideas of the past and the present.[632]
Opinions of such weight would seem to establish a priori that the culture of Islam, dominant in thirteenth-century Europe, must have been known to Dante. It is inconceivable that he, leading a life of such mental activity, should have ignored Moslem culture, which at the time was all-pervading; that he should not have felt the attraction of a science that drew men of learning from all parts of Christian Europe to the court of Toledo, and of a literature the influence of which was paramount in Christian Europe, which it initiated in the novels, the fables and the proverbs, as well as the works on moral science and apologetics, of the East.[633]
The prestige enjoyed by Islam was largely due to the Moslem victories over the Crusaders.[634] Roger Bacon, a contemporary of Dante, attributed the defeats of the Christians precisely to their ignorance of the Semitic languages and applied science, of which the Moslems were masters.[635] In another field of learning, Albertus Magnus, the founder of scholasticism, agreed with Bacon on the superiority of the Arab philosophers[636]; and Raymond Lull even recommended the imitation of Moslem methods in preaching to the people.[637]
Rarely can public opinion have been so unanimous in admitting the mental superiority of an adversary. This view was upheld by Moslem men of learning, who adjudged the European races to be unfit for civilisation. This curious assertion was actually made by two Moslem thinkers of Spain in the eleventh century, Ibn Hazm of Cordova, and Said of Toledo. In their respective works, the Critical History of the Religions and the History of the Sciences, they declared that the peoples of Northern Europe were by nature unfitted for the cultivation of the sciences and arts, which flourished in Moslem Spain.[638]
3. In view of the universal admiration for Islamic culture, it is not astonishing to find a certain leaning towards it on the part of Dante.
It was at one time believed that Dante had a knowledge of Semitic languages, especially of either Arabic or Hebrew, the inference being based on two solitary verses of the Divine Comedy. Modern opinion, however, favours the view that in these verses the poet merely intended to introduce meaningless phrases, though it is admitted that the words attributed to Nimrod contain Semitic elements.[639] Be this as it may, if it cannot be proved from Dante’s writings that he knew the Semitic languages, neither can it be proved that he was ignorant of them. It may at least be supposed that he knew of their qualities and aptness as a means of social intercourse; and, indirect as his knowledge may have been, it was sufficient to enable him to compare them with the Romance languages, to the disadvantage of the latter. For, treating in his work, De vulgari eloquio, of the multitude of languages spoken in the world, he, although a native of Florence and by race and language a Latin, does not allow himself to be prejudiced in favour of his mother tongue; rather does he show proof of his characteristic breadth of mind when he admits “that there are many other nations speaking tongues more pleasant to the ear and more expressive than those of the Latin peoples.”[640]
4. It need hardly be added that such attraction as Dante felt towards Oriental culture does not imply a liking for the Moslem faith, for the sincerity of his Christian belief is beyond all doubt. His sympathies were merely literary, and scientific; and his mental attitude is revealed in two typical passages of the Divine Comedy. Avicenna and Averrhoes he places in the limbo,[641] but Mahomet, in hell.[642] And even Mahomet is not punished as the founder of Islam, but as a sower of discord and an author of schism; he is placed along with men the effect of whose actions cannot be compared with the profound upheaval—religious, social and political—that Islam caused in the history of the world and, to her unutterable loss, in the history of the Church. The leniency of this punishment is significant of Dante’s sympathies for Arabic culture. In his eyes, Mahomet is not so much a repudiator of the Trinity and Incarnation as a conqueror whose violence cut asunder the ties uniting mankind. Incomplete as his picture may be, it does not display the absurdity marked in the mediæval fables of the Prophet. The Christian historians of Dante’s age outvied one another in weaving the most extravagant and contradictory tales about Mahomet. According to some, he was a pagan; to others, a Christian. He was given in turn the names of Ocin, Pelagius, Nicholas, and Mahomet. Some depict him, rightly, as illiterate; others, as a magician, or even a scholar of Bologna. He is represented as having been a Spaniard, a Roman, and even a member of the family of Colonna. Some historians, again, confuse the Prophet with his mentor, the Nestorian monk Bahira, and make of him a deacon or cardinal who, aspiring to the Papacy, set out for Arabia from Constantinople, Antioch or Smyrna.[643] Before the gross ignorance displayed in such crude misrepresentations, the sober picture drawn by Dante stands as a silent rebuke to his contemporaries. One is tempted to think that Dante was content to depict Mahomet as a mere conqueror, not because he was unaware of the other sides to his character, but because the portrayal of these would have been incompatible with the absurd image stereotyped on the minds of his readers.
That the restraint shown by Dante is not due to ignorance is abundantly borne out by one fact. The poet shows Ali suffering the same torture as his cousin and father-in-law, Mahomet. The role played by Ali in the history of Islam is nowadays a matter of general historical knowledge. It is well known that the Caliphate did not pass to his sons or their descendants, who were hunted down by the Ommeyad and Abbaside Caliphs; but they soon found eager partisans who, under the name of Shiites, dominated Persia, Syria, Egypt and Barbary down to the twelfth century. The history of the bloody struggles provoked by this undoubted schism down to the time of Saladin, fully justifies the placing of Ali, the unwitting cause of the great split, among the authors of schism. But, natural as this may now appear, it was quite beyond the understanding of the Christian historians of Dante’s age. To them the figure of Mahomet himself was an enigma, let alone that of his cousin Ali. Accordingly, the early commentators on the Divine Comedy are at a loss to account for his appearance alongside of the Prophet.[644] The contrast between the ignorance of the Christian writers and the thorough knowledge displayed by Dante in itself argues a considerable acquaintance on his part with Islamic lore.
But there is still further evidence. The figure of Ali is sketched with a sober realism that is no mere creation of the poet’s imagination, in fact it is strictly in accordance with historical data.[645] The assassin Ibn Muljam, the Moslem chroniclers state, with one stroke of the sword cleft open Ali’s skull, or, according to others, struck him in the forehead with a dagger, which split open his head and penetrated into the brain. The tragic scene must have vividly impressed the early Moslems, for legends soon arose according to which Mahomet, or Ali himself, prophesied the sad fate awaiting the latter. “Thy assassin—said Mahomet to him—will strike thee there—and pointed to his head—and the blood from the wound will flow down to here—and he touched his chin.”[646]
5. In addition to a knowledge of Islamic tradition, Dante displays a general sympathy with Moslem philosophers and men of science. In his minor prose writings he frequently quotes, and occasionally makes use of, the works of the astronomers, Albumazar, Alfraganius and Alpetragius, and the great philosophers, Alfarabius, Avicenna, Algazel and Averrhoes.[647] Thus, Paget Toynbee has shown how some of the passages in the Convito and the Vita Nuova are based upon the astronomical theories of Alfraganius or the ideas of Averrhoes on the lunar spots. In his De vulgari eloquio (I, 6) Dante himself admits having read books on cosmography, and the most common of these at that time were Arabic.
This accounts for the benevolent treatment accorded by Dante to men like Saladin, Avicenna, and Averrhoes, whom he places in the limbo—a treatment that, judged upon theological principles, is indefensible. No one, and certainly not Dante, could have been unaware of the hostility shown by Saladin to everything Christian, and of how he had overrun Palestine and wrested the Holy City from the grasp of the Crusaders. Neither the military qualities nor the magnanimity of Saladin can be regarded as natural virtues sufficient in themselves to warrant the exemption from eternal punishment of one who did such grievous harm to the faith of Christ. The same may be said of Avicenna and Averrhoes. However blameless their conduct may have been, their learning excluded all possibility of their defence on the plea of utter ignorance of Christ that, according to the doctrine guiding Dante, could alone have justified their deliverance from hell. Averrhoes, moreover, stood in the eyes of the Christian Europe of the time as the embodiment of rationalistic unbelief.[648]
6. Dante’s sympathies for Islamic science in general, and for Averrhoes in particular, furnish the key to another enigma, as has recently been shown in a clever study by Bruno Nardi.[649] This was the hitherto incomprehensible presence in Dante’s paradise, side by side with St. Thomas Aquinas, of Sigier of Brabant, the champion of Averrhoism, who died under the ban of the Church. How, it was asked, could this defiance of public opinion be justified? For, it should be noted that the poet not only exempts this heretic from the punishment of hell, but even exalts him to the mansion of the theologians, and, with a crowning presumption bordering upon sarcasm, places in the mouth of his irreconcilable adversary, St. Thomas, words of praise for the outcast that are equivalent to a rehabilitation of his memory.
7. Nardi, to solve this problem, reopens the question of the sources of Dante’s philosophy, hitherto regarded as exclusively Thomist. By a close comparison of Dante’s works with the writings of other scholastics of the neo-Platonic school and the systems of Avicenna and Averrhoes, he shows that Dante, far from appearing as an unconditional Thomist, was a scholastic, but of eclectic tendencies, who accepted theories from all thinkers ancient and mediæval, Christian and Moslem, and embodied them in a system of his own that was intermediate between the philosophy of St. Thomas and that of Avicenna and Averrhoes, although more akin to the latter. The main points in Dante’s philosophy that Nardi has shown to be of Arabic filiation relate to cosmology, theodicy and psychology: God is Light, whose rays grow weaker as they travel further from their Centre. The Intelligences of the Celestial Spheres reflect these rays and thereby imprint the various forms upon Matter. Creation must, therefore, be conceived as a gradually decreasing emanation of the Divine Light, and is brought about, not by God directly and exclusively, but through the medium of the Celestial Spheres. The intellective part of the human soul is distinct from the vegetative-sensitive part; the former alone is created. Intellection begins by Divine illumination and needs the help of Faith before it can attain to super-sensible Truth.
Nardi proceeds to show how these ideas of Dante, although found in part in the Augustinian tradition, are rather derived from the neo-Platonic philosophy of the Arabs and, more particularly, from the systems of Alfarabius, Avicenna, Algazel and Averrhoes.