Again, the world is best disposed when justice is paramount therein;
but this can only be under the Monarch or Emperor, who alone, free from
covetousness and supreme in authority, will have the purest will and
the greatest power to practise justice upon the earth (i. 11). Under
him the human race will be most free, since it will have the fullest
use of freewill, the greatest gift of God to man (i. 12). He alone,
adorned with judgment and justice in the highest degree, will be best
disposed for ruling, and able to dispose others best (i. 13). From him
the particular princes receive the common rule by which the human race
is guided to peace; his is the dominating will that rules the wills of
mortals, disposing them to unity and concord (i. 14, 15). All these
and other reasons show that, for the well-being of the world, it is
necessary that there should be the Monarchy. And they are confirmed
by the sacred fact that Christ willed to become man in the “fullness
of time,” when the world was blessed with universal peace under the
perfect monarchy of Augustus, the seamless garment that has since been
rent by the nail of cupidity (i. 16).
To the modern mind the first book of the _Monarchia_ is the most
important. The conception that the goal of civilisation is the
realising of all human potentialities is one of abiding significance.
Divested of its mediaeval garb, the Empire itself becomes a permanent
court of international justice, a supreme and impartial tribunal
of international arbitration. Within such a restored unity of
civilisation, nations and kingdoms and cities will develop freely and
peacefully, in accordance with their own conditions and laws (_cf._ i.
10, 12, 14, and _Conv._ iv. 4). Here Dante anticipates what Mazzini
called the “United States of Europe,” or, more broadly, “Humanity.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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