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of his two preferred sources: Scripture and philosophy (from Matthew and, on this occasion, Aristotle).
    Man, who participates in two natures—one corrupt (the body), the other incorruptible (the soul)—has a twofold goal, and since he is the only being who participates in both corruptibility and incorruptibility, he has a goal for his body and a goal for his soul. God, who never errs, has, then, given man two goals: happiness in this life and happiness in the eternal life. The pope leads mankind to eternal life in accordance with revelation, while the emperor leads mankind to temporal happiness in accordance with philosophical teaching. The temporal monarch, who must devote his energies to providing freedom and peace for men as they pass through the “testing time” of this world, receives his authority directly from God.
    Intellectual perfection, the happiness of this world, can therefore beattained without the Church. With proper guidance from the universal monarch, man can regain the happiness of the earthly paradise—this is a dangerous conclusion that can easily follow from Dante’s arguments in his treatise, and one that Dante himself does not draw. Not surprisingly, the book was placed on the
Index of Forbidden Books.
Unfortunately for Dante, what he wished and wrote for in the
De monarchia
did not come about. It is for this reason that the poet’s main political focus shifted from the empire to the Church when he wrote the
Divine Comedy.
With the death of Henry VII, Dante’s hopes for the empire and the universal monarch began to fade; he was forced to put aside his ideal and face facts: a monarch and an empire would not overcome the power of the pope and the Church.
    While Dante divides temporal and spiritual authority in the De mon-
archia
by means of ingenious logic and scholastic arguments (and in the
Divine Comedy
by its larger allegorical structure), his masterpiece reveals the sad truth that temporal and spiritual authority are often in the same hands. There are many passages that lament this fact. In the
Purgatorio
(canto XVI), to cite one of the more famous passages, Marco Lombardo tells the pilgrim why the world has gone bad (“
la cagion che ‘l
mondo ha fatto reo”:
106-112):
    On Rome, that brought the world to know the good, once shone two suns that lighted up two ways: the road of this world and the road of God.
    The one sun has put out the other’s light, the sword is now one with the crook—and fused together thus, must bring about misrule,
    since joined, now neither fears the other one.
    No one is quite sure if Dante is the author of a pedantic little essay written in Latin with the title
Questio de aqua et terra
(
Discourse on the Nature of Water and Earth
). According to a statement attached to the original manuscript, the essay is in essence a lecture delivered at Verona in 1320. It consists of twenty-four brief chapters that debate in detail the question of whether or not the water of the sea anywhere rises higher than land emerging from it. The document was first published in 1508 by G.B. Moncetti, who claimed that he had copied it from an autograph manuscript of Dante’s; the manuscript, however, was never found.
    Among Dante’s other minor works we find his two pastoral odes in Latin, addressed to Giovanni del Virgilio, who was a professor of Latin at the University of Bologna, where Dante at one time had probably studied. The exchange of Latin hexameters between the two men took place when Dante was staying in Ravenna some two years before his death. In his verses Giovanni del Virgilio reprimands Dante for writing his great poem in Italian rather than Latin. The eclogues are interesting insofar as they reveal Dante’s mood toward the end of his life: he seems to be playful, happy, and at peace with himself. Also evident in these verses is the poet’s pathetic wish to return to his fair city to receive the laurel crown, as well as his feelings and hopes for the
Divine