2

THE ‘FEDE SANTA’

 
     In the Vienna Museum are two medallions, one representing Dante and the other the painter Peter of Pisa; the reverse side of each bear the letters F.S.K.I.P.F.T., which Aroux interprets as: Frater Sacrae Kadosch, Imperialis Principatus, Frater Templarius. For the first three letters this interpretation is obviously incorrect and does not convey any intelligible meaning; we think it should read Fidei Sanctae Kadosch. The association of the Fede Santa, of which Dante seems to have been a leader, was a tertiary order of Templar filiation, justifying the name Frater Templarius; and its dignitaries bore the title of Kadosch, a Hebrew word meaning ‘holy’ or ‘consecrated’, which has been preserved to our days in the high grades of Masonry. It is then not without reason that Dante takes Saint Bernard, who established the rule of the Order of the Temple, as his guide for the completion of his own celestial journey,¹ apparently wishing to point out in this way that, given the conditions characteristic of his time, access to the highest possible degree of the spiritual hierarchy was attainable only in this way.
 
     In order to explain the Imperialis Principatus, perhaps one need not limit oneself to considering Dante’s political role, which shows that the organizations to which he belonged were at the time well disposed toward the imperial power. We must point out moreover that the ‘Holy Empire’ has a symbolic significance and that even today in Scottish Masonry the members of the Supreme Councils bear the titles of dignitaries of the Holy Empire, while the title ‘Prince’ appears in the denominations of many grades. Further-more, beginning with the sixteenth century the leaders of the different organizations of Rosicrucian origin bore the title of Imperator; and there are reasons to think that in Dante’s time the Fede Santa bore certain similarities to what later became the ‘Brotherhood of the Rose-Cross’, even if the latter is not more or less directly derived from the former.
 
     We shall find many more parallels of this kind, and Aroux himself indicated a considerable number of them. One of the essential points on which he shed light, without perhaps drawing from it all the conclusions it implies, is the significance of the different symbolic regions Dante describes, and more especially the ‘heavens’. These regions actually represent as many different states, and the heavens are properly speaking ‘spiritual hierarchies’, that is to say degrees of initiation. In this context an interesting concordance could be established between the conception of Dante and that of Swedenborg, not to speak of certain theories of the Hebrew Kabbalah, and especially of Islamic esoterism. In this regard Dante himself has provided a clue worth mentioning: A vedere quello che per terzo cielo s’intende ... dico che per CIELO intendo la scienza e per CIELI le scienze [author’s emphasis].² But what exactly are these ‘sciences’ understood under the symbolic designation of the ‘heavens’, and should we see therein an allusion to the ‘seven liberal arts’ so often mentioned elsewhere by Dante and his contemporaries? What leads us to think that this must be the case is that according to Aroux, ‘the Cathars had signs of recognition, passwords, and astrological doc-trine as early as the twelfth century; they conducted their initiations at the vernal equinox; their scientific system was founded on the doctrine of correspondences: Grammar corresponded to the Moon, Dialectic to Mercury, Rhetoric to Venus, Music to Mars, Geometry to Jupiter, Astronomy to Saturn, and Arithmetic or Illumined Rea- son to the Sun.’ Accordingly, to the seven planetary spheres – the first seven of Dante’s nine heavens – corresponded the seven liberal arts respectively; and precisely these same designations are depicted on the seven rungs of the left upright of the Ladder of the Kadosch (30^th degree of Scottish Masonry). The ascending order, in this latter case, differs only in an inversion, on the one hand, of Rhetoric and Logic (which is substituted here for Dialectic), and, on the other, of Geometry and Music; and also in that the science corresponding to the Sun (Arithmetic) occupies the rank normally assigned to that star in the astrological order of the planets – the fourth, or mid-point of the septenary – whereas the Cathars placed it on the highest rung of their Mystical Ladder, as on the corresponding rung on the ladder’s opposite upright, Dante places Faith (Emounah), that is to say this mysterious Fede Santa of which he was himself Kadosch.³
 
     However, further comment is necessary on this subject, for how is it that correspondences of this kind, which are assimilated to real initiatic degrees, have been attributed to the liberal arts, which, after all, were taught publicly and officially in all the schools? We think they must have been considered in two ways, the one exoteric and the other esoteric. It is possible to superimpose on any profane science another science that is related to the same object but looks at it from a profounder point of view, and which is to that profane science what the higher meanings of the scriptures are to their literal meaning. One could say further that external sciences serve as a mode of expression for higher truths because they are themselves only the symbol of something that is of another order; for as Plato said, the perceptible is only a reflection of the intelligible. The phenomena of nature and the events of history all have a symbolic value in that they express something of the principles upon which they depend, and of which they are the more or less remote consequences. Thus, by means of a suitable transposition, all science and all art can assume a true esoteric value; why then, in the initiations of the Middle Ages, should the expressions drawn from the liberal arts not have played a role comparable to that played in speculative Masonry by language borrowed from the art of the builders? We will go further: to look at things this way is, after all, to bring them back to their principle; this point of view is, therefore, inherent in their very essence, and not accidentally super-added; and if this is the case, could not the tradition to which it is connected go back to the very origin of the sciences and arts, whereas the exclusively profane viewpoint preponderant in the modern age would only be the result of a general forgetfulness of this tradition? We cannot deal with this question and its many ramifications here, but let us see how Dante himself, in the commentary he gives on his first Canzone, points out the way in which he applies to his own work the principles of some of the liberal arts: O uomini, che vedere non potete la sentenza di questa Canzone, non la rifiutate però; ma ponete mente alla sua bellezza, che è grande, sì per COSTRUZIONE, la quale si pertiene alli GRAMMATICI; sì per L’ORDINE DEL SERMONE, che si pertiene alli RETTORICI; si per lo NUMERO DELLE SUE PARTI, che si pertiene alli MUSICI [author’s emphasis].⁴ Do we not hear an echo of the Pythagorean tradition in this way of relating music and number in a science of rhythm, with all its correspondences; and is it not this same tradition, precisely, that makes possible an understanding of the ‘solar’ role attributed to arithmetic, which it makes the common center of all the other sciences, and also of the correspondences that unite them, especially of music with geometry, through knowledge of proportion in forms (which finds its direct application in architecture), and, in the case of astronomy, through knowledge of the harmony of the celestial spheres? In what follows we shall see clearly enough what fundamental importance the symbolism of numbers assumes in Dante’s work; and even if this symbolism is not uniquely Pythagorean and reappears in other doctrines for the simple reason that truth is one, it is no less permissible to think that from Pythagoras to Virgil, and from Virgil to Dante, the ‘chain of the tradition’ was undoubtedly unbroken on Italian soil.


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[1] Paradiso, XXXI. The word contemplante, which Dante uses later to describe Saint Bernard (idem, XXXII, 1), appears to have a double meaning due to its affinity with the name of the Temple itself.
[2] Convivio, t. II, chap. 14. ‘To see what is meant by this third heaven, I say that by heaven I mean science, and by heavens, sciences.’
[3] Concerning the Mysterious ladder of the Kadosch [the Holy Ones], which we shall consider later in this study, see the Manuel maçonnique of F∴ Vuilliaume, pl. XVI and pp. 213-214. We cite the second edition (1830).
[4] Here is the translation of this text: ‘O men, who cannot see the meaning of this Song, do not however reject it; but pay attention to its beauty, which is great, either for its construction, which concerns the grammarians; or for the order of its discourse, which concerns the rhetoricians; or for the number of its parts, which concerns the musicians.’