GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THE SPLIT 131
of between Church and State it is a conflict between
two bodies of officials, the civil and the ecclesiastical."
The wars between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire,
although in theory the matter at issue was the division of
power between the temporal and the spiritual authorities,
were in fact a conflict between these "two bodies of
officials".
Views of Dante (1265-1321). The problem of the
relation between the temporal and the spiritual power
is also discussed in Dante's famous work De Monarchic,
which appeared in 1310. While St. Thomas maintained
that the temporal ruler was in the last resort subordinate
to the spiritual, Dante sought to effect a complete separation
between the two spheres, a separation which would
leave each authority paramount in its own. Dante shares
the general prc-suppositions of St. Thomas's thought.
Man, he would agree, has his being upon two planes,
the natural and the supernatural, and his ultimate salva-
tion is to be found upon the latter. He also held that it
is to the next world rather than to this one that we must
look for the fulfilment of man's spiritual being. "Providence,"
he wrote, "has set two things before man to be
aimed at by him: the blessedness of this life which consists
in the exercise of his proper power and is represented
by the Earthly Paradise; and the blessedness of eternal
life, which consists in the fruition of the sight of God, to
which his proper power cannot ascend unless assisted by
the divine . . . light. Now to these two ends n&n must
attain by different means."
So far as the means to the "Earthly Paradise" are
concerned, Dante was prepared to follow the Greeks,
defining man, as Plato and Aristotle defined him, as a
social being whose end is the realization of all his
potentialities and, more particularly, of the potentialities
of the intellect. The achievement of this end entailed
co-operation with his fellows in society; for, Dante maintained,
"no man was abb to obtain felicity himself without