Dante Alighieri · Philosophy
Dante’s revolutionary choice to write his masterpiece not in scholarly Latin but in Italian - and his argument, in <em>De Vulgari Eloquentia</em> and the <em>Convivio</em>, that the living mother tongue is <em>nobler</em> than Latin. Behind the choice is a question about who philosophy and wisdom are really for.
In Dante’s world, serious thought wore Latin. Theology, philosophy, law, science - everything that counted as learning was written and argued in the ancient language of the church and the schools, a language you could acquire only through years of formal education that were closed to almost everyone. The vernaculars - Italian, French, the everyday tongues people actually spoke - were considered fit for love songs and market talk, not for weighty matters. So Dante’s decision to write his enormous poem of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven - a work of the deepest theology and philosophy - in Italian rather than Latin was genuinely radical, even scandalous. He was taking the most exalted subjects imaginable and clothing them in the language of the street and the hearth. It was a wager about who wisdom is for, and it changed the history of European literature. But it was not a careless choice or a mere convenience. Dante had thought hard about language, and he defended the vernacular with arguments as bold as the choice itself.
Dante grounds his defence of the vernacular in a genuine philosophy of language, one he dramatizes in Paradise itself, where the soul of Adam - the first speaker - explains how human speech works. That human beings speak at all is natural, built into us by God as surely as the instinct to seek our own good. But which language we speak, the particular words and forms, is not fixed by nature; it is left to human art and choice, and so it changes constantly over time. No single tongue is divinely appointed and eternal; even the language of Eden passed away. This is a quietly momentous claim. If no language is sacred by nature, and all are the mutable products of human making, then Latin holds no God-given monopoly on serious thought, and the living vernacular is not a degradation but simply the natural speech of a living people. Dante turns a technical point about the origin of language into a liberation: since the form of speech is ours to shape, we are free to raise the vernacular to the highest uses, and there is no eternal law that reserves wisdom for Latin.
Choosing the vernacular was not enough; Dante had to prove it could do what Latin did - carry the weight of the deepest thought and the highest beauty. Italian in his day was a scatter of local dialects with no single literary standard and little prestige. So Dante set out, in De Vulgari Eloquentia, to describe an ‘illustrious’ vernacular: a refined, elevated form of the mother tongue, drawn from the best of the dialects but belonging to no single town, worthy of the loftiest subjects. And then, far more importantly, he made it - in the Divine Comedy itself. He forged a Tuscan-based Italian supple enough to render the stench of Hell and the light of the empyrean, colloquial and sublime by turns, capable of theology, tenderness, satire, and terror. The poem was not just written in Italian; it in large part created literary Italian, becoming the foundation of the national language. Dante had argued that the vernacular deserved the highest tasks. Then he handed it the highest task there was, and it rose to meet him.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Dante argued the vernacular is nobler than Latin (because it is natural, first-learned, and universal), and made the radical choice to write his philosophy and his Comedy in Italian, opening wisdom to those excluded from Latin - a decision about language, audience, and who knowledge is for. Explain th…
Leads to Thomas Aquinas.
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