Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez de la Peña holds a Ph.D. in medieval history from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He has been a visiting research fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and a research fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge. In 2002, he began his teaching career at the CEU San Pablo University, where he has been Professor of Medieval History since 2021. He is the author of seven books and fifty research articles in several languages. We spoke about his latest book, Dante’s Europe.
What drives you to analyse a historical figure like Dante?
My starting point is a vindication of what is good about medieval civilisation and medieval Christianity. And within that civilisation there are few figures as charismatic and attractive as Dante. There are not many well-known medieval figures, but Dante is one.
As you point out in your book, Classical Antiquity has been the lighthouse and source of inspiration for our Western civilisation, and today that same civilisation questions and even denies its origins. Why?
There are many reasons. On the one hand, self-hatred has taken root in many intellectuals: that is, denying your roots and your tradition in a vision of history in which the ‘other’ is necessarily the victim and the West is necessarily the aggressor. Another part of the problem is Adanism, the idea of the ‘good savage’: i.e., that all civilisation, including the West, is worse than man in a primitive state. And the third notion has to do with a damnatio memoriae, a denial of what Christianity is. Here there is an element of rejection of the Christianity of the Middle Ages, because it is wrongly presented as a totally dark age in which the influence of Christianity was negative.
The idea that the Middle Ages were the ‘dark age’ of man is immediately refuted when seeing the beauty of its cathedrals.
Indeed, beauty does not deceive. There is something that doesn’t fit: how could it be that people of a ‘dark age’ built and worshipped in these cathedrals?
There is also a mythification of the pagan, but a paganism that is mixed with the modern and is more of an almost mythological past.
There are several re-readings of the past. In the Middle Ages, there is a vindication of pagan antiquity seen through the eyes of the humanists, which has nothing to do with the pagan seen through the eyes of the enlightened. And then there is the neo-paganism of the 20th century, which has a Nietzschean touch, a vindication of violence. It all depends on how you look at the past. Today’s neo-paganism is much more of a myth.
Your book speaks of revisiting the enlightenment of the Western Middle Ages characterised by “fidelity, hierarchy, and honour,” to quote Le Goff, values that go against the grain today. It is no coincidence that these three principles have been emptied of content.
Yes, like many other concepts have been. These are specifically mediaeval, but the same is true of many classical concepts. I have chosen Dante because he is a mediaeval intellectual who vindicates the classical city—classical Rome—and who chooses Virgil as a guide in purgatory and hell; and also to vindicate a Middle Ages which, far from being an enemy of the classical, was in love with the Greco-Roman city. To defend the Middle Ages is to defend Classical Antiquity. There is no opposition.
Your essay is divided into three parts: Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem—three inseparable pillars for understanding our European identity. When and why did the West begin to look the other way?
The West decided to renounce Jerusalem in the Enlightenment, and only stayed with Rome and Athens. In part, it was a response to Protestantism, which decided to do without Rome. After May 1968, the world abandoned the three pillars to start a new Western identity, empty of history and tradition, from a clean slate. At that moment, the three legacies were discarded to build a new world, post-modernity, which is the one we are in and which turns its back on the past.
How do we go back?
Memory and identity. Without memory, a person is a zombie. Imagine a family, a city, a nation, or a civilisation that forgets its past: it would also be a zombie. What we are living through, especially with the woke culture, which is the most extreme form of postmodernity, means that we have broken with our ancestors and are effectively in a zombie civilisation. How do we solve this? Memory and identity. Recover memory in order to have identity. You have identity if you have ancestors and tradition. That is the antidote.
“Dante è nostro,” Dante is ours, as Pope Paul VI said. In Italy, Dante is not only the supreme poet, but also—as Marcello Veneziani says—“Nostro Padre,” the father of the Italian homeland. This Dantesque ownership and paternity is also European. What synthesises this identity in his figure?
It’s a fascinating subject, because you can’t be more Italian than Dante: he was the equivalent of Cervantes and Nebrija in Spanish culture, he was the poet of Italian identity, and culturally he is the most important Italian.
And he thinks of Italy as a unity.
Yes, like Petrarch. Although for Petrarch there was only Italy, while for Dante there was also Christianity. He thinks of Italy as Rome, in an imperial key, so he doesn’t think only of Italy, he thinks of the whole of Europe. He is a founding figure for Italy, but at the same time he is the apostle of the Empire, because he is profoundly Roman.
In the book you talk about Dante’s humanism. What remains of Dante’s humanist idea today?
That legacy has been partly lost, but there remains the dream of the classical humanities and the dream of a political ideal that takes Ancient Rome as its reference point. But it is very much in the minority and, in fact, I wrote the book because Dante’s legacy is very much forgotten. Even the European project is a betrayal of Dante’s dream, because it is a Europe of merchants in which national identities get in the way. Dantean universalism was a project of Europe or Christianity that was not against national identities. The problem is that some of today’s ideas are, as Chesterton would say, “old Christian ideas that have gone mad,” and they confuse concepts. This is what is happening with Dante. What the Italian humanists were dreaming and saying is not the same as what is being advocated today.
Does this have to do with the loss of transcendence?
Yes; if you take religion out of the equation, if you take Jerusalem out of the equation, there is no more Dante. And it’s not just that: it’s that even the vision of Rome and Athens is different. The Roman and Hellenic traditions have also been discarded, even if it has been done in a more subtle way than with Christianity, which has suffered evident hostility since the French Revolution. The Greco-Roman ideal has been dismissed since May ’68 in a non-explicit way.
Dante’s legacy endures, but our current cultural and political projects are a betrayal not only of Dante, but of the whole of Western civilisation.
Can we return to Dante in a civilisation that does not know right from wrong?
Without good and evil there is no civilisation. Distinguishing good and evil is an achievement of civilisation.
Dante chose Virgil to be his guide on his journey through Hell and Purgatory. Who should be the guide today for the difficult journey through Europe and the West?
I have chosen Dante, but choosing a contemporary character is difficult. I think I would choose Tolkien, because he has the literary, the philosophical, and the religious dimension. His ideas were good even though he was not politically active. Tolkien has a literary microcosm that gives you all the answers.
In today’s world, there are no longer conflicts like those that confronted popes and emperors in Dante’s Europe. Instead there are complex geopolitical balances that are perhaps more dangerous than those of the past, because the fate of the West is at stake. How do you imagine Dante in the present context?
This situation was also present in Dante’s time, with the Islamic incursions in the Mediterranean, although it is true that with less intensity than in the past and in what was to be the later period with the Ottomans. For Dante, Islam is both a threat and an opportunity. It is a threat because he is very clear that Muhammad is a heresiarch and that is why he places him in hell in The Divine Comedy, and for this reason several Islamic associations in Italy have wanted to ban his work. But, at the same time, Dante, like the whole medieval tradition, values Arab knowledge.
In the Islam of that time, unlike today, there were fields in which the Arabs still had a certain superiority. For this reason, medieval scholars and kings were clear that it was necessary to learn from them without forgetting that they were a threat. There were Crusades, but there was also a school of translators in Toledo.
