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October 2, 2009

Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto XIX

Canto XIX

Dante begins with an epic apostrophe - but not of the muses:

O Simon mago, o miseri seguaci
  che le cose di Dio, che di bontate
  deon essere spose, e voi rapaci
per oro e per argento avolterate
  or convien che per voi suoni la tromba,
   però che ne la terza bolgia* state.

Simon Magus, O you wretched crew
  of his disciples! The things of God should be
  espoused to righteiousness and love, and you
Rapacious wolves, you pander them for gold,
  foul them for silver! Sound the trumpet now
  for you -- for this third pocket is your place.

The simonists, those who like Simon Magus want to reduce sacred authority to a cash transaction, are planted upside down in holes, with fire burning the souls of their feet. The red-hottests pair of feet turn out to be those of a recent pope, Nicholas V. Esolen cleverly points out that Nicholas had inverted the purpose of the hierarchy of which he was head, so this makes an example of Hell fitting the sin.

Nicholas mistakes Dante for Boniface VIII - he wonders if the prediction was off by a few years and Boniface is already dead and waiting to be plunge Nicholas deeper into the hot hole. Dante then leaps forward to Boniface's even worse successor, Clement V.

It is clear from all this that Dante is generally troubled by the temporal power of the Church - he takes it all the way back to the Donation of Constatine. Dante's problem is that the sources of temporal authority he wanted to like were the Empire and the Kingdom of France - neither of them very likeable, either.

Still a problem today, and no more liable to a solution other than the individual holiness of clerics and just uprightness of rulers. It could happen.

*When I was proofreading I noticed this little moment of structural orientation I had slid past before. Handy!

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Posted by CrankyProfessor at October 2, 2009 8:14 AM