Canto XIV Dante meets two Italian souls, one from the Guelf party and one from the Ghibelline, who castigate the inhabitants of their former land. The poets then hear the bridle of envy, including the voice of Cain who looked enviously on the Divine favour Abel enjoyed after his sacrifice.

I generally compose this blog in the lunchbreak at work, after reading the mid-day office and the day’s canto. Today I was bogged down in a major job. I turned to Dante for edification and what do I get? Two 13th Century Italian souls grumbling between themselves about the state of the country. At such moments it is tempting to say, as JRR Tolkien once did :‘Dante.....doesn’t attract me. He’s full of spite and malice. I don't care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities’.

There is no getting away from politics in Purgatorio. The politics of the time in Dante’s Italy were dominated by the conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Papacy. Broadly speaking the Ghibelline party favoured the Emperor and the Guelfs favoured the Pope. But the situation was complex. Dante, for example, came from a Guelf family, but he was firmly opposed to the Papal cause; that is to say to the arguments for the Pope's functioning as a prince over Papal states. Dante held that the Roman Empire represented an ideal for rule over the human community. The Church did not because its role is to be a sacrament of the human community to come: the Kingdom of God. This, essentially, was the argument of the ‘Spiritual’ Franciscans who wanted the Church to emulate St Francis by embracing poverty as the way of Christ.

While Dante was very much concerned with political issues, and involved with the politics of Florence, which led to his exile from that city, he opposed Italy’s factionalism. Perhaps this is why a Guelf and a Ghibelline join to condemn their homeland. In addition to the two main parties there was another political grouping in Florence, the Popolo, and the Guelfs were divided (as far as most historians can see on entirely obscure grounds) into the ‘Black’ and ‘White’ factions. Dante’s terms of office was during the White Guelf ascendancy.

So what can we say about Dante? He should not be co-opted into contemporary debates on secularism (separating Church and State, restricting the Church to the private sphere). He wanted the Church to perform its true sacramental role, but not to withdraw from public matters. Indeed he thought that temporal Papal power prevented the Church from engaging properly with questions about government and justice. Lent is not a time to withdraw from our concerns about society and politics. If anything they should be heightened, just as visiting Purgatory does not take Dante’s mind off the political turmoil in Italy, but strengthens his outrage.

The root of Envy is holding our own good to matter more than the good of others. This is clean contrary to the “Golden Rule” to do to others as we would be done to. John Finnis, the philosopher of law, in his book on the political philosophy of Aquinas, sees the Golden Rule as the rational heart of the good social life. My basic human goods do not outweigh yours. That is our fundamental equality. Perhaps the cornice of the envious is not such a bad place to grumble about politics after all!