The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy
by Joan Ferrante

Table of Contents | Ch.3

Chapter 02, "Church and State in the Comedy"

THE PROPER FUNCTlONING of the empire on earth depends not only on its relations with individual cities and kingdoms, but also on its relations with the papacy. The jurisdictional dispute between secular and ecclesiastical authority, the third and certainly the most controversial question Dante takes up in the Monarchy, also permeates the Comedy. He deals with it directly in Marco Lombardo's discourse on the two suns (Pg. 16) and in the various attacks on the Donation of Constantine, and indirectly in his own frequent and clear denial of any but a spiritual and didactic function to the church and in his unrelenting criticism of the greed, corruption, and abuse of their position by individual popes and churchmen. In the Monarchy, Dante deals with the questions theoretically; in the Comedy, he confronts them more practically. The emperor is the only figure who can keep peace on earth because only he is not vulnerable to greed (Monarchy, 1.11); greed for money and power is the dominant characteristic of the churchmen in the Comedy. Christ told his disciples his kingdom was not of this world, that they were not to possess gold and silver (cited in Monarchy, 3.10.14), but churchmen in the Comedy pursue little else. The nature of the church is its form, and its form is the life of Christ, sacrifice, teaching, good example (Monarchy, 3.15), a life which in the Comedy is eschewed by all but the early popes and martyrs and a handful of later reforming saints, all men who avoided worldly power and possession. The Monarchy ends with the statement of man's two goals, befitting his two natures: the earthly paradise, to which he is led by the emperor through reason, philosophy, and morality, and the heavenly paradise, to which he is guided by the church through faith and spiritual teaching. In the Comedy, Dante is led to the Earthly Paradise by Virgil, the poet of empire, who glorifies the empire's meaning and history, and to heaven by Beatrice, the figure of theology, the faith on which the church is based. Both Dante's guides are surrogates for the malfunctioning organs of empire and church which they represent, and which Dante comes to represent when he is crowned in the Earthly Paradise.

The major moral obstacle to achieving the perfect state is greed for wealth and power; the major political obstacle is the papacy. The church interfered in local and international politics and asserted its right to do so on the basis of Scripture and canon law. Papal jurisdiction in temporal affairs was opposed by both monarchists and imperialists, but the former dominated the debates in the thirteenth century. The most interesting material and the largest volume in the church-state controversy during this period was produced by the struggle between Pope Boniface VIII and the French king Philip IV. Giles of Rome wrote on both sides of the issue in different periods; John of Paris, James of Viterbo, a series of clever but anonymous pamphleteers, and a virtual army of skilled and learned canonists took part in it (see introduction). The basic arguments for and against papal supremacy are similar; monarchists differ from imperialists mainly in their assertion of the independence or autonomy of individual states. When Dante draws on the monarchist arguments, he turns them to the support of the empire; in the Comedy, he condemns the French royal house almost as severely as he does the papacy because it offers the most powerful secular opposition to the empire outside Italy.

Boniface, who brought the conflict to a head, is an important figure in Dante's Hell, although he does not appear as a character in it. Dante had personal as well as philosophical reasons to condemn him, which he does by assigning him a place in Hell, although he is not yet dead in 1300 when the journey is supposed to be taking place. Boniface's role in Italian, particularly Florentine, politics and in Dante's own exile, along with his extreme position on papal supremacy, would be enough to explain Dante's animosity towards him.[01] But Boniface inspired the same kind of fierce hostility in much larger circles during his lifetime and for many years after his death, well into the period when Dante was writing the Comedy and long after the French king had effectively gained control of the papacy by the election of French popes and the transfer of the curia to Avignon. It is not surprising that Boniface is a powerful presence in the poem and seems to personify the corruption of the papacy for Dante even though he died years before Dante wrote most of it.

A brief survey of Boniface's actions and the stories that circulated about him should explain Dante's presentation of him. The troubles between Philip and Boniface began with jurisdictional clashes of various kinds: Philip imposed taxes on the clergy without first getting papal permission, and the pope, in response, forbad payment (Clericos laicos, l296); the king then stopped all passage of money out of the country, a blow to papal finances. [02] Boniface created a new bishopric separating Palmiers from Toulouse, and the bishop he appointed to it proclaimed that he was subject only to the pope, in temporal as well as spiritual matters, not in any way to the king, whom he went out of his way to insult; eventually the king had him arrested (Dupuy, Histoire du Differend, 197-98, Digard, Philippe le Bel vol. 2, 51 ff.). Boniface produced a series of bulls, some asserting his claims, some retracting them, and the situation was complicated by false bulls and letters circulated in his name, which made more extreme claims and elicited strong responses from the king's party.[03] It did not help that the king's party included disaffected Italian cardinals of the Colonna family, old enemies of Boniface whom he had removed from their posts. Perhaps the best known of Boniface's authentic statements is the bull Unam Sanctam, 1302, claiming a divine hierarchy in which spiritual power excels any earthly power in dignity and nobility and establishing the earthly power; the spiritual power can judge the earthly, whereas only God can judge the spiritual. Anyone who does not accept the pope's position is a heretic, and it is essential to the salvation of any human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.[04]

Boniface tried to excommunicate Philip at different times. On one occasion, 1301, when no one would publish the decree, the pope complained to a French official: "Nos habemus utramque potestatem" ("We have both powers," spiritual and temporal); the Frenchman replied "Utique Domine, sed vestra est verbalis, nostra autem realis" ("That may well be, my Lord, but yours is verbal, ours is real," Dupuy, Histoire du Differend 193, Riviere, Le. Probleme, 121). Boniface tried again, in 1303, to excommunicate Philip and place his subjects under anathema unless they renounced their oaths to the king; but before he could publish the bull, Philip had him captured in a rather blatant display of real power. Boniface's position as pope was complicated by the fact that questions had been raised about his legitimacy because he had ascended while the previous pope, Celestine V, was alive. If the pope was the bridegroom of the church, there could be no other husband while he lived, divorce being frowned upon even in regard to an institution. The objection, as stated in the records of the hearings held on Boniface after his death, was:

... sicut vir non debet adulterare uxorem suam, ita nec Episcopus Ecclesiam suam, id est. ut illam dimittat ad quam consecratus est; et sicut uxori non licet dimittere virum suum, ita ut alteri se vivente eo, matrimonio societ, aut eum adulteret, licet fornicator sit vir eius; ... absit enim quod Romano Pontifice vivente alter possit eligi: iam enim Ecclesia non esset una unius, sed una plurium; ... non esset formosa et electa, sed deformis et monstruosa, dum in uno corpore Ecclesiae duo capita forent, quod esset omnino monstruosum, ridiculosum et absurdum.

. . . just as a man should not defile his wife, so the bishop should not defile his church, that is, put away her to whom he was consecrated; and as it is not permitted to a wife to put away her husband, so that she might join in matrimony with another while he is still living, even if her husband is a fornicator, . . . it is not fitting that while the Roman pontiff is alive, another be chosen: for then the church would not be one of one but one of many; . .. it would not be beautiful and elect, but deformed and monstrous, while there were two heads in the one body of the church, which would be in every way monstrous, ridiculous and absurd. (Dupuy, Histoire du Differend, 449)

There are a number of interesting points in this passage besides the marriage imagery: (1) the husband as fornicator, compare the Ottimo's commentary on Purgatory 32, calling Boniface the lover (drudo) of the curia, not her legitimate spouse 2.576-77;[05] (2) the two-headed monster, an image the church often used to support its own claims to supreme power in Christendom, which Dante turns around in the Comedy (see below); and (3) the separation of a bishop from his diocese, a touchy point, since Boniface was himself criticized for abusing the practice.[06] It did not help matters that Boniface was popularly believed to have tricked Celestine into renouncing the papacy and retiring to a monastery. A contemporary Italian chronicle claims that Boniface had a tube inserted in the wall of the former pope's bedroom, which he spoke through for three nights, pretending to be the angel of God and telling Celestine to renounce his position.[07] When he did, Boniface had him imprisoned in a monastery in case he should change his mind--or get a different message--until he died. Thus, Boniface's papacy was tainted from the beginning. When Boniface died, chronicles report, he fulfilled the prophecy that he came to power like a fox, he would rule like a lion, but die like a dog.[08]

While he reigned, Boniface was accused of almost every imaginable vice; the attacks range from plays on his name to criminal allegations. Guillaume de Nogaret, one of Philip's advisers who was to play an important role throughout the conflict, publicly called Boniface a master of lies even in his name: "faciens se, cum sit omnifarie maleficus, Bonifacium nominari et sic nomen falsum sibi assumpsit," "though a malefactor in every way, he took on a false name and had himself called Boniface."[09] An official act, made in the presence of king and court by several nobles, accused Boniface of various heresies and blasphemies, of fornication, simony, idolatry, demon-worship, war-mongering, sodomy, assassination, violation of the confessional, political intrigue, embezzlement of crusade funds, and of saying he would rather be a dog or an ass than a Frenchman. The point of the last accusation was to show that he did not believe the French had souls, though it sounds more like the outburst of a strong temper. The same accusations were made for years after his death. Philip threatened to have him tried for heresy as a means both of controlling subsequent popes and of blackmailing them to dissolve the Templars, and Philip compelled the church to hear witnesses and take depositions against Boniface for eight years after his death. It is a curious irony, and one that must have appealed to Dante, that Boniface is a presence throughout the Comedy, although he cannot actually appear in it because, according to the fiction, he is still alive, just as he was a constant presence in the hearings against him, though he could not appear at them because he was already dead.

Boniface was posthumously accused of the same variety of sins: of fornication and sodomy with specific partners (Dupuy, Histoire du Differend, 527, 539-41), of political intrigues, particularly against the Ghibellines. When told that the church in which a group of Ghibellines was taking refuge had not been destroyed because it contained the bones of saints who would be angry when the resurrection came, the pope said: "You're trying to do penance before you sin--destroy the church and don't worry about them, they'll no more rise from the dead than my horse that died yesterday" (Dupuy, 543). This story must remind readers of the Comedy of Hell 27: after Boniface tricks Guido into sinning by promising absolution, a devil comes for Guido's soul and points out that one cannot be absolved who does not repent, and one cannot repent and will at the same time (27.118-19). The situation is reversed here, but the words are similar and both incidents reveal the abuse of religious belief to lead others into sin for political advantage. The most persistent accusations against Boniface are those of blasphemy and heretical beliefs: that he denied the resurrection; that he disparaged the Eucharist as "no more Christ's body than I am," "it's only dough" ("immo pasta est"), and Christ's mother, "no more a virgin than my mother was" (Dupuy, 538).

Whether there is any truth to these charges, they indicate the scope and persistence of the tradition of Boniface as an archvillain. The same view is to be found in early commentaries on the Comedy: Pietro, Dante's son, calls Boniface "princeps clericorum hypocritarum," "the prince of hypocritical clerics" (240); Guido describes him as "perversa conscientia depravatus et arroganti superbia elevatus," "depraved by a perverted conscience and exalted by arrogant pride" (559). The Ottimo misses no opportunity to pass on rumors about him: on Hell 3, he remarks that Boniface deceived Celestine with tricks; on canto 19, that he got his position by simony, that he sold church positions or bestowed them on unworthy relatives, and that he corrupted cardinals with money, gifts, or promises; on 27, speaking of the war between Boniface and the Colonnesi, the Ottimo tells a gratuitous story about Boniface's nephew, sick for love of a woman. Boniface invited the woman to a banquet, had her seated before a door so that during the dinner she could be pulled into another room, where his nephew was waiting to rape her (1.468). On Purgatory 16, discussing the separation of powers, the Ottimo says that Boniface crowned himself and girded on the sword, and made himself emperor, "e fecesi egli stesso imperador" (2.291); on canto 20, he mentions that Boniface excommunicated Philip over the see of Palmiers; on 32, in connection with the corrupt curia, he notes that Dante had had experience of it in the time of Boniface when he went there as ambassador for his commune, and that he calls Boniface the lover, not the legitimate husband, of the church (2.577). On Paradise 9, he explains that the prophecy that Rome will soon "be freed of the adultery" refers to Boniface, who came to the pontificate by simony and deception; on 17, he describes Boniface's intrigues with Corso Donati, and finally, on canto 27, we are told that Peter's indignation at his place being usurped refers again to Boniface, elected by simony and deception. It is clear from the Ottimo's frequent remarks, as well as from the French records, that Dante's view of Boniface as the corrupt pope is a popular contemporary view.

The papacy, even after Boniface, was at a low point while Dante was writing the Comedy. Popes had allowed themselves to be removed, with the curia, from the traditional seat of the church at Rome to Avignon, where the French Monarchy could exert a powerful influence. Clement V undermined the empire by withdrawing his support from Henry Vll and refusing to crown him at St. Peter's, at Philip's insistence; he further undermined it after Henry's death by claiming that the emperor swore fealty to the papacy (Romani Principes) and that the pope could assume power in the empire when it was vacant (Pastoralis cura). But he also contributed to the decline of the papacy by giving in on the Templars and exempting the French Monarchy from Unam Sanctam (in Meruit).[10] Popes had made extravagant claims and practiced continual intrigues. They were perceived by their enemies as greedy, petty men, leading the church in the wrong direction and giving a bad example to the Christians they were supposed to guide, and that is how Dante portrays them in the Comedy, where their corruption is condemned from the beginning of Hell to the summit of Paradise. A pope is included among the first souls Dante sees in Hell, because he rejected the task God set for him, but probably also because his abdication left the way open for Boniface.[11] In the circle of gluttony, a reference is made to the political intrigues of the pope (Boniface) in Florence, when he pretended to favor peace but really encouraged one party against the other. In greed, all the condemned souls Dante notices are clerics, among them popes and cardinals, their greed set in direct opposition to God's will as manifest by Fortune, who disposes wealth and power according to a divine plan. The canto begins with the guardian monster shouting "Pape Satan, pape Satan," probably suggesting "Pope Satan."[12] Among the heretics, there is a cardinal and a pope, Anastasius, who either was led into heresy by his deacon, or led him; the Italian is purposely ambiguous: "lo qual trasse Fotin de la via dritta") Hell 11.9: "whom Photinus drew away from the right road" or "who drew Photinus from the right way") and either meaning is shocking, since it is the pope's responsibility to protect the faithful from heresy. In any case, the pope presents a striking contrast to Virgil, who delivers a lecture on the categories of sin to Dante later in the same canto. The poet, as so often in the Comedy, provides the guidance the church fails to give.

Among the sodomites (homosexuals) in Hell, there are several clerics and a bishop who was "transferred" by the pope (Boniface ):

. . . dal servo dei servi
fu trasmutato d'Arno in Bacchiglione
dove lascio li mal protesi nervi

. . . by the servant of servants
he was transferred from Arno to Bacchiglione
where he left his badly stretched nerves.

(15.112-14)

The word trasmutato combined with mal protesi nervi suggests that the pope seduced him; Boniface was often accused of the sin (cf. Jacopo, 1.286). The circle of simony, graft within the church, is, of course, dominated by popes, who commit adultery with the "bride of Christ," who prostitute her for their own greed; Boniface is awaited in this section. The hypocrites are clothed in heavy lead cloaks in the style of the monks of Cluny, a faticoso manto meant to remind us of the papacy, since manto is associated with the papacy through the Comedy.[13] Finally, the fraudulent counsellor, Guido da Montefeltro, tells Dante that it was a pope who tricked him into committing his sin one last time and, worse yet, into thinking he had been absolved of the sin before he committed it, so that he died technically unrepentant. Thus the pope, Boniface again, not only leads him into sin, but directly into damnation. Boniface, and with him the papacy, emerges from the Inferno as a malevolent spirit, inducing others into all kinds of sins and creating disorder all around.

Even in Purgatory we are reminded of Boniface, though less critically: in connection with the indulgences offered to souls during the Jubilee he proclaimed (Pg. 2.98-99) and in the midst of a catalogue of the sins of the French king, who "captured Christ in his vicar" (20.86-90).[14] It is, of course, ironic that the only way Boniface imitated Christ was in suffering an attack he had brought on himself. It is also worth noting that the only one in the Comedy to call the pope the vicar of Christ is an ancestor of the French king, the other serious obstacle to the empire. But near the end of Paradise, Dante brings us back to the infernal view of Boniface and sets him forever in his place: Beatrice, pointing out the seat reserved for the emperor Henry in the heavenly rose, tells Dante that Henry will be opposed by a pope (Clement V) who will be thrust into the circle of simony, pushing "quel d'Alagna" (Boniface) further down into the hole (30.148); since this is the last line of the canto, it is particularly emphatic.[15]

Along with the condemnation of individuals, there are possible allegorical allusions to the church in Hell: one is the Veglio di Creta, the statue drawn from Daniel, which the Ottimo glosses as representing the ages of the world, with the leg of clay representing the current age of the church all intent on worldly delights, and the foot of clay the seventh age, those completely given over to greed; he also mentions the great worldly possessions of the church beginning with the gift of Constantine, which he considers the source of temporal cupidity in the church (1.275-76).[16] Pier della Vigna may also stand for the corrupt papacy, but this will be discussed later in this chapter; Ulysses as pilot taking his boat on a disastrous journey has been connected with the corrupt church.[17] Since the church in Purgatory is represented by angels, the devils in Hell may well represent corrupt churchmen; in canto 18 they direct the traffic of Hell, as the church did Rome's during the Jubilee, and in canto 34, the last view of Lucifer's legs, upside down, recalls the popes' feet in the circle of simony. That the living body of a friar, Frate Alberigo, is inhabited by a demon because his soul is already in Hell, reinforces this interpretation. If these analogies are correct, the devils, the "black angels" (23.131), in the circle of barratry represent the clergy who manipulate politicians and throw them into the pitch; indeed, the scene between Dante and Virgil and the devil Malacoda reminds Benvenuto of his own experience at the papal court of Urban at Avignon (2.118).

In Purgatory, Dante allows the church a positive function through the recognition of the sacraments and religious ritual, but he carefully divests it of human features which might suggest actual churchmen. The whole rock of Purgatory may well represent the church, which Christ founded on "the rock," Peter (Matt. 16:18).[18] Dante is baptized before he begins to climb it, and makes two confessions as he passes through it; the whole realm is filled with hymns, with biblical examples, didactic sculpture, even sermons, and it ends with the procession of the books of the Bible and the drama of church history. The permanent residents of Purgatory, however, are not churchmen but angels; they carry the symbols associated with the papacy, Peter's keys and the swords, but they are pure spirit. There can be no question of their being lured into the temporal realm. Pietro Alighieri clearly identifies the angel at the gate of Purgatory as a "figure" of a priest (361), as does Benvenuto (3.263), and Statius, within the poem, calls him "il vicario di Pietro" (Pg. 21.5); Jacopo della Lana says the keys represent the power to loose and bind, which is held by ministers of the church in the world. Apart from the angels, there is only Cato at the bottom and Matelda at the top, a pagan hero (who committed suicide) and a woman, neither one a traditional churchman, though Matelda served the church's cause. To some extent, the papacy is vindicated in Purgatory by Dante's acknowledgment of its power to grant indulgences and to excommunicate, but the latter is qualified by the fact that the effect of excommunication can be modified by the prayers of individuals; that is, the love of laymen outweighs the anger of popes in God's justice. It does not increase our sense of papal dignity to learn from one of the souls (Manfred) that a pope had his body disinterred and left to the mercy of the elements because he had died excommunicate; we are reminded of this gratuitous violence to a lifeless body when another soul (Bonconte da Montefeltro) tells how his unburied body was attacked by a frustrated devil who was denied possession of the soul. It would be hard to avoid the analogy between the frustrated churchman and the frustrated devil. If the angels represent what the church should be, devils in Hell represent what it has become; like Lucifer, they start higher and therefore fall lower than other creatures.

We are also told several times in Purgatory of popes interfering in political affairs: in canto 6, it is because of them that there is no emperor to enforce the laws; in 16, by taking on temporal authority, "confounding two governments in itself," the church soils itself and its burden arid deprives the world of the two organs ordained by God to guide it, the empire, which cannot function, and the church, which malfunctions. "Now I understand," Dante says, all innocence, "why the sons of Levi [the priesthood] were excluded from inheritance" (Pg. 16.131-32). The one pope Dante meets in Purgatory, Hadrian V, in canto 19, is an example of greed corrected, but only when he achieves the height of earthly wealth, the papacy, and learns how little it means.[19] Then he turns to spiritual matters, an ironic instance of the papacy teaching virtue to the pope. In any case, he was pope for only thirty-eight days, enough to save himself, but not to do much for others. Mention is made of one very early pope, Gregory 1, whose prayers helped to save the soul of the emperor Trajan, a rare example of the proper relation of church and state (cf. Sylvester, who cured and converted Constantine, and Agapetus, who saved Justinian from heresy), but the featured story of conversion in Purgatory is that of Statius, who was rescued from sin and pagan beliefs by the words of the pagan poet Virgil (see chapter four).

At the end of Purgatory, in the Earthly Paradise, Dante presents a brief reenactment of the major stages in the history of the church (represented by the chariot), particularly in its relations with secular government. Although the focus in the drama is on the church's struggle to survive various attacks from religious and secular forces, the message is that the church is corrupted by secular power and wealth, and must be saved ultimately by the empire. The chariot which represents the church is described as more splendid than any which pleased Scipio or Augustus at Rome (29.115-16), or than the sun's, which was destroyed to save the earth (29.117-18). This moves Benvenuto to remark that Dante exalts the chariot by naming two glorious leaders, one who wondrously rescued the public state from danger, the other who felicitously ordered it (4.197-98). The sun's chariot refers to Phaethon's disastrous journey, with the implicit suggestion that the church could be destroyed if its lack of control threatened the safety of the world. In Dante's letter to the cardinals, he berates them, reminding them of God's wrath:

Vos equidem, ecclesiae militantis veluti primi praepositi pili, per manifestam orbitam Crucifixi currum Sponsae regere negligentes, non aliter quam falsus auriga Phaeton exorbitastis . . .

But you, who are like the commanders of the first rank of the church militant, neglecting to guide the chariot of the Spouse of the Crucified along the open track, have gone astray no differently than the false charioteer Phaethon...

(Ep. 8.4)

When the chariot is fixed to the tree of divine justice, in which the eagle of empire lives, the tree is renewed, because the church gives new life to divine justice, whose living exponent is the Roman empire. However, when Christ first established the church, the empire was pagan, so the eagle attacks the chariot; later, when the empire becomes Christian, the eagle bestows its feathers on the chariot (the Donation of Constantine), and later still, the chariot is covered with more feathers (new gifts of temporal possession and power from major secular leaders) and becomes a monster with seven heads and ten horns, like the beast of the Apocalypse. The church that was meant to be the spiritual vessel for God's grace is given life artificially and becomes a dangerous beast. The heads and horns represent the distortion of the Ten Commandments and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (or the seven virtues), the bases for moral life on earth.[20] Once the chariot has become a monster, a whore takes her place on it (the papal curia, which prostitutes the gifts of the church) and dallies with a giant (the king of France, Philip IV), who abuses her when she looks at Dante (the good Christian or the Italian people), and drags her off along with the monster (the removal of the papal court to Avignon). The church that first appeared drawn by Christ and bearing theology (the griffin and Beatrice) has become a monster carrying the corrupt curia and dominated by the king of France.

There is general agreement among the early commentators on most of the imagery in this drama, with minor exceptions: Jacopo identifies the whore with the pope and the giant with the kings of France who raped and adulterated the church and whored with popes (2.388); the Ottimo interprets the giant as Boniface, who was the illicit lover, not the legal husband, of the church (2.577);[21] to Jacopo, Dante represents the Christian people (loc. cit.), to Benvenuto, the Italian people (4.265). Pietro interprets the dragon that rends the chariot, usually identified as a schism, as Anti-Christ, who inflames the cupidity of the pastors of the church for temporal things (528); the Ottimo identifies it with the beast of the Apocalypse (2.574), while Jacopo and Benvenuto connect it with Mohammed. But the major lesson of the drama, the danger to the church when it takes on temporal power or possession or gives itself over to secular domination by the wrong leader, is the same for all of them: when the church works with the empire, it serves the divine purpose; when it invades the temporal sphere, it becomes its victim and loses the ability to perform its divine function.

The attacks on the church for failing to do what it should and for getting into areas it has no business in, continue through Paradise, for the most part put in the mouths of saints whose purity and, presumably, judgment are beyond question.[22] Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, Peter Damian and Benedict, all decry the corruption of the modern church in contrast to the poverty and self-sacrifice of the early saints, and all make it clear that the church should not be concerned with worldly goods. Though their attacks are most often directed at their own orders, they also implicate the papacy, either directly or indirectly, as the rotten head from which corruption flows through the body.[23] Bonaventure describes the papacy as the seat that once was kinder to the poor, but is now degenerate, not in itself but in those who hold the office; he tells us that Dominic sought not the church's wealth, which belongs to the poor, or position, but permission to fight heresy, and that he himself also put temporal cares below spiritual, even when he held high office (Pr. 12.128-29). He and Thomas both lament the corruption of their respective orders, which had been instituted to reform the church, and Thomas indirectly identifies the church with Poverty, by speaking of Poverty as Christ's widow (11.64 ff.) just after Dante has spoken of the church as Christ's bride (10.140) and shortly before Bonaventure does (12.43). Benedict also speaks of the decline of his rule in his order and the misuse of church funds that properly belong to the poor; Peter Damian contrasts current luxury (modern pastors whose mantles are so large they cover themselves and their elegant horses, "two beasts under one hide") with apostolic poverty (Peter and Paul, thin, barefoot, taking food where it was offered, 21.127-34).

But the most striking attack on the church is made by Peter, the first pope, who rages against those who have exploited his face on the "lying privileges" they sell (27.53), and "usurped" his place, now vacant in the eyes of God (27.23-24). According to the fiction of the poem, this vacancy must refer to Boniface, who either had no right to be pope, or who has lost that right by abusing the position, or both. However, to a contemporary audience, it would also suggest the more recent popes, Clement V and John XXII, who failed to support properly elected emperors and claimed authority over the "vacant" empire. Dante turns the tables on them by having Peter declare the papacy vacant.[24] It is left to Peter, the pope on whom so many of the later papal claims to temporal authority were based, to make the strongest anticlerical attack of all. He himself denounces the claims that were made in his name. His speech in Paradise 27 can be read as an answer to Boniface's Unam Sanctam: both use the imagery of the Song of Songs to describe the church, Boniface calling it "my dove," Peter, "the bride of Christ," but Boniface emphasizes the mystical body whose head is Christ, Peter that it was born of the blood of the early martyrs. Boniface stresses the unity of the church, Peter points out that the papacy is dividing Christians. Boniface cites the two swords and "feed my sheep"; Peter rages because popes are making war on other Christians and the shepherds have become rapacious wolves. Boniface claims jurisdiction over the temporal sphere, Peter cries that Christ's gifts were not made to acquire gold. Boniface cites Peter as the foundation of the church's power, through the keys to loose and bind, Peter says the keys are being used against Christians. And finally, Boniface claims that there is no salvation without subjection to the Roman Pontiff; Peter, the first Pontiff, ends with a promise of divine aid, of Providence working through secular Rome:

Ma l'alta provedenza, che con Scipio
difese a Roma la gloria del mondo,
socorra tosto....

But the high Providence, which with Scipio
defended the glory of the world at Rome,
will soon give aid....

(Pr. 27.61-63)

The language of Boniface's bull and of Peter's speech is drawn from traditional papalist material; it has its sources in Bernard of Clairvaux's De consideratione, his advice to Pope Eugene III, which emphasizes papal responsibility rather than rights, in Giles of Rome's De ecclesiastica potestate, dedicated to Boniface and supporting his position, in John of Paris's attack on the papal position, De potestate regia et papali, and echoes in Dante's Monarchy and political letters. The same images and arguments recur through the Comedy as well.[25]

I would now like to look at some of the major arguments and images from this tradition and show how Dante uses them in the Comedy. Papal claims to power in the temporal sphere were based not only on the interpretation of biblical passages, but also on the supposedly historical document the Donation of Constantine, which purported to give the pope political authority over the city of Rome and the provinces and cities of Italy and the western regions. That it was an eighth- or ninth-century forgery was not known at the time, so the main arguments against it questioned its legal validity, denying that the emperor had a right to diminish the empire and bind later emperors (John 21, Monarchy, 3.10), or tried to limit its scope to Italy or to the city of Rome ("in urbe non tamen in orbe," Quaestio, 106).[26] In the Comedy, there is a series of attacks on the Donation. In Hell, Dante seems to blame it for the corruption of the later church: "Ah, Constantine, how much evil was born not of your conversion but of that dowry which the first rich father took from you" (Hell 19.115-17); calling it a "dowry" suggests that the pope, unlike Christ, has to be paid to marry the church. The other reference to Constantine in Hell does not mention the Donation, but it would be difficult to miss the connection: when Guido da Montefeltro explains how the pope persuaded him to sin, he says that as Constantine asked Pope Sylvester to cure him of leprosy, so the pope asked Guido to cure him of his fever. The cure effected by Sylvester led to Constantine's conversion and thus to the Donation. In Guido's case, the roles are reversed: the pope, playing the emperor's role, is the afflicted one, with a fever for power or revenge, and he goes to the former political figure, now a monk, for a cure, a plan to undo his enemy. The modern pope is in a sense carrying on the tradition Sylvester began, of operating in the temporal sphere.

In the Earthly Paradise, at the top of Purgatory, the Donation is symbolized by the feathers which the eagle (the Roman empire) drops on the chariot (the church), turning it into a monster while a voice laments from heaven. In Paradise, the emperor Justinian begins a history of the empire and its place in God's plan with an allusion to Constantine's mistake: "Poscia che Costantin l'aquila volse/contr' al corso del ciel," "after Constantine turned the eagle against the course of heaven."[27] Justinian himself is an example of the proper relation between pope and emperor, in that a pope, Agapetus, led him back to the true faith and prepared him to undertake the task God intended for him--to reform the laws. Constantine himself appears in the eye of the eagle, aware now of the mistake he made and of the disaster it has brought on the world, although it is not held against him:

ora conosce come il mal dedutto
dal suo bene operar non li e nocivo,
avvegna che sia il mondo indi distrutto

(Pr. 20.58-60)

These words are spoken by the eagle, which is divine justice working through the empire. Thus heaven condemns the act because it runs counter to providential order.

The church also claimed supremacy in the temporal sphere on the basis of precedence in time: priests, they said, had preceded and even instituted kings, therefore kings were subject to them. The priesthood began with Abel and continued through the patriarchs to Samuel who "made" the first king of the Jews (Giles, De ecclesiastica potestate, 1.6, 3.1). John of Paris argues on the other side that there was no true priesthood before Christ, but there were true kings (De potestate regia et papali, 4), that it is kings who prefigure Christ in the Old Testament (18.26), and their power came directly from God (10); even prelates derive their powers not through the pope but from God, since Christ, not Peter, sent the apostles out (loc. cit.). In the Monarchy, Dante points out that seniority does not determine authority--there are, after all, young bishops with old archdeacons (3.5)--a point that should be considered in connection with the last passage in the Monarchy, where Dante grants that Caesar owes Peter the reverence of a firstborn son to his father (3.16). That does not mean he accepts papal supremacy, as is sometimes claimed, but simply the dignity accorded seniority. Dante calls Samuel, the supposed kingmaker, a messenger, not the vicar of God, one who has no discretion to act on his own, but is merely a tool, a "hammer" (3.6). In the Comedy, Dante emphasizes Jewish kings rather than priests or patriarchs:[28] Solomon, Joshua, David, and Hezekiah, are prominently placed, but the only priest who appears is Nathan, who rebuked David but could not be said to have "made" him and who supported Solomon's accession; that is, a moral guide and support to kings, not an authority over them. Nathan appears in the same circle with Solomon, who is singled out among all the saints there for great praise, and David is seen in a higher sphere of heaven with Hezekiah. By placing the two Jewish kings, David and Hezekiah, in the eye of the eagle, "the sign that made the Romans revered through the world," along with the pre-Roman pagan Ripheus, Dante makes it clear that the "Roman" empire in the providential plan is as old as divine justice on earth.

Precedence in time is related to the issue of hierarchy and the supremacy of the spiritual power. The biblical passage usually cited in support of the latter involves the "two swords" (Luke 22:38): when Christ tells the apostles to buy swords, Peter shows him the two he has and Christ says "It is enough." This passage is open connected with John 18:11: after Peter has cut off Malchus's ear with his sword, Christ tells him to put it back into its scabbard. Bernard, in De consideratione, tells Pope Eugene to attack with the word, not the sword, and not to usurp the sword he was commanded to sheathe; that is, not to use temporal means or interfere in temporal affairs. Although he says both swords belong to the pope (or else Christ would have said "That's too much" instead of "That's enough"), he cautions that only one is to be used by him, the other for him, at the request of the pope but at the command of the emperor (4.7), an important distinction.[29]

Bernard's emphasis is on discouraging the use of the swords; papalists were later to seize and build on the statement that both swords belonged to the church. Boniface cites it in Unam Sanctam, but adds that since everything in the universe is ordered hierarchically, one sword must be higher than the other. Giles comments that as body is subject to spirit, so is temporal sword to spiritual (De ecclesiastice potestate, 1.7); if earthly powers are subject to ecclesiastical, the temporal things they govern must also be; and with the spiritual sword the pope can cut off the right ear of the sinner, with which he would hear the word of God; that is, excommunicate him (2.5). John of Paris points out that doctors of the church do not interpret the swords as temporal and spiritual power, but as the Old and New Testaments or the word and persecution (De potestate regia et papali, 18.30); even if they are taken to represent the two powers, Peter is told to sheathe the spiritual one so as not to abuse it, and he never touches the other. The Quaestio notes that God ordained two swords for two distinct and different jurisdictions; the material sword is for princes and this was used only once by Peter, when he cut off Malchus's ear, but he was told to sheathe it (99). Dante, like John, denies the interpretation of the two regimes in the Monarchy; for him, the two swords signify words and deeds to carry out what Christ said he had come to do by the sword. When he told his disciples to buy swords, he intended one each, so when he said "that's enough," he meant if they could not have twelve, two would do (3.9). In the Comedy, the angels who perform church functions carry a sword, but only one, and it is the spiritual one; the angel who sits at the gate of Purgatory etches the seven P's on Dante's forehead with that sword. The two in the valley of negligent princes carry one sword each, which has been glossed as representing the two equal powers.[30] The temporal sword by itself is mentioned in a passage on the division of powers and the need for a strong secular leader: when the pastoral staff is joined with the sword, both go astray (Pg. 16.109-11).

Boniface applies the meaning of the two swords to another image, the two great lights (luminaria, the sun and the moon), in a discourse welcoming Albert of Austria, whom he was then supporting for emperor: as the moon has no light except from the sun, so earthly power has only what it gets from the spiritual.[31] This is a more powerful image, because the hierarchical relationship is built into it, and it aroused strong reactions: John of Paris again turns to a doctor of the church for a different interpretation, this time to IsiDoré, who equated the sun with the kingdom, the moon with the priesthood (the synagogue) in his gloss on Genesis (De potestate regia et papali, 14.4). Cino da Pistoia reverses the analogy in his Lectura in codicem, making the empire the sun and the papacy the moon.[32] But even if one accepted the papal analogy, John points out, the moon has a virtue of its own by which it can cause wet and cold, the opposite of the sun, so although a prince may take instruction from the pope and church on the faith, he has his own power direct from God (cf. Quaestio, 96). Dante, almost impatiently, notes the problems of interpreting Scripture, and warns that it is a crime to pervert the intentions of the Holy Spirit. The sun and the moon were created before man, he points out; if man had not fallen, he would not have needed the church and state, so God cannot have intended that meaning by them--he would be a stupid doctor indeed who prepared a plaster for an abscess on a person not yet born (Monarchy, 3.4). Nonetheless, like John, he assumes that some will refuse to reject the analogy; to them he says that the moon has its own powers and operation. In his political letters, Dante goes out of his way to address and describe the emperor as a sun of peace ("Titan pacificus"), as the bridegroom of Italy, a Moses who will deliver his people from Egypt, in other words, a Christ figure (Ep. 5.1-2).

At the center of Purgatory, Dante has one of the souls discourse on the "two suns" that were ordained by God to guide man along the two roads of life, but one, the church, has put out the other, the empire (16.106-09). The two suns is a startling image and states most forcefully, particularly in the mouth of a blessed soul from the perspective of the other world, that the two should be equal powers on earth. However, it violates the natural order, so when Dante rises through the planets in Paradise he is limited to one sun which is necessarily higher than the moon, but he does the unexpected with the souls he finds there. The Moon contains not secular rulers, but religious women (nuns) who failed in their vows; in the Sun Dante finds great teachers, mostly religious men, but among them one acknowledged to have achieved the height of wisdom for his calling, Solomon, a king. He had, we are told, the greatest wisdom of all (10.109-14) because, as it turns out, he asked only for sufficient wisdom to be king (13.95-96), as if to be a good king were the highest role a man could play. Thomas Aquinas, who makes the remark, eventually explains that he was speaking of Solomon as without equal among kings (13.106-08), but that explanation comes a full three cantos after the initial praise, allowing us, all through the sphere of the wise, to think of Solomon as the wisest among them. This is Dante's way of emphasizing the importance of a king's judgment, and the distinction between the king's function to judge and rule, and the priest's to guide and teach.[33] And beyond the Sun, higher still, are more kings: among the crusaders in Mars, and as the sole representatives of divine justice in Jupiter, where they appear in the sign of the Roman empire. Only the monastic figures who rejected the world and the early apostles who lived without wealth or power are higher.

One of the most contested areas of jurisdiction between church and state is the judicial; the king as guardian of the law has fundamental rights in temporal cases, but the church made claims on the basis of sin (ratione peccati), a fairly loose and comprehensive category, to judge a wide variety of cases. The claim was based on the passage in Matt. 16:18-19 where Christ says to Peter: "Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church . . . And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind up on earth, it shall be bound also in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven." Giles takes this passage to mean that Christ gave Peter, hence the pope, jurisdiction over soul, body, and possessions (De ecclesiastica potestate, 2.4); since the rules of property are based on the communion of men in society, the church, through excommunication, has power over possessions as well as over souls. Because of original sin, none can be the just lord of possessions except through the church, which absolves from original sin and therefore has ivs utile over all temporal things; the church can deprive Caesar for culpa or causa, while earthly power can operate only over laymen (3.11).

Bernard had tried to keep property distinct from sin in his advice to the pope: your power is over sin not property, he said (De consideratione, 1.7), not because the pope did not have the right to judge in all matters, but because temporal matters were beneath his concern and involving himself in them might lead to corruption; the pope was entrusted with the stewardship not possession, of the world (3.1). John of Paris picks up that point (De potestate regia et papal, 6) and adds that even ecclesiastical property is given to the community, not to the pope, and that lay property is under the jurisdiction of lay princes. Christ, as man, did not possess the temporal kingdom, therefore he did not pass it on to Peter (8-10). The keys represent only the spiritual power to forgive sins, the authority to teach, not the power to command (13), and only in spiritual matters; it would be stupid to deduce from the biblical text any power to absolve from the bond of debts (14.2). A pope may judge an emperor guilty of heresy, and excommunicate his subjects until they depose him, but only they can depose him, while an emperor may force the deposition of a criminal pope (13), unless his offense is spiritual and then the cardinals must act.

In the Monarchy, Dante takes a moderate but firm position on the powers conferred by the keys: they are those which pertain to the pope's office as custodian of the heavenly kingdom, nothing more; they do not empower him to dissolve marriages or absolve the impenitent, or to bind and loose decrees of the empire (3.8). In the Comedy, the popes' misuse of their powers is severely criticized: excommunication as a political weapon is attacked by Saint Peter in heaven and undercut by Manfred in Purgatory. Manfred, an heir to Frederick's empire, was the object of every kind of papal weapon: Alexander IV and Urban IV excommunicated him several times, Urban preached a crusade against him, and Clement IV had his body disinterred. Manfred was also a terrible sinner by his own admission ("orribil furon li peccati miei," Pg. 3:121) and yet he is saved. Excommunication, he explains to Dante, can keep someone waiting longer to get into Purgatory, but it cannot keep him out of heaven as long as "his hope remains green" (3.135: "mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde"), a play on the river Verde, with which it rhymes, where the pope had his body thrown; his hope counteracts the pope's vindictiveness. In other words, those keys cannot be used to close heaven against souls. Peter had told the angel in Purgatory, to whom he entrusted them, to err in opening rather than in shutting, if people were sincerely repentent (Pg. 9.127-29).[34] It is not that Dante does not respect the power of the keys when properly used, but that modern popes use them for their own sordid purposes; they put them on the banners they carry when they fight other Christians (Pr. 27.49-51), they sell the gifts of the sacraments for gold and silver, flouting Christ's purpose, as Dante emphasizes with a sarcastic question to the simoniac Pope Nicholas III: how much did Christ want from Saint Peter when he gave him the keys? (Hell 19.90-92). At the end of a fierce sermon delivered to the feet of this upside-down pope,[35] Dante says that if it had not been for his own reverence for the keys, he would have used even stronger words, though it is hard to imagine what they might have been. There is some irony in Dante's calling them the keys that y ou held "in the happy life;" what Nicholas held were the keys to the happy life, but since he failed to use them properly, for himself or for others, life on earth now seems "happy" in comparison to hell; there is further irony in that Christ told Peter when he gave him the keys that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church (Matt. 16:18).

The worst abuse of the keys in the Comedy is, of course, Boniface's boast of their power in order to entice Guido da Montefeltro back into the sin he was atoning for; Boniface told him that he had the two keys so that he could shut or open heaven, and he would absolve Guido of the sin before he committed it. The claim is totally unjustified since the keys do not work unless a sinner is truly repentant, and he cannot repent an act before he commits it. Boniface, in this case, perverts both his priestly functions in one act, by leading a soul into sin and exploiting the sacraments for political ends. He also makes a cynical remark at the expense of his predecessor who "did not hold the keys dear," that is, gave up his position; Boniface seems to imply that Celestine did not understand the real value of the keys--what could be gained from them. There is one other reference to the keys which Dante does not connect directly with the church, but which is filled with suggestive allusions: in Hell 13, among the suicides, he meets Pier della Vigna, whose name means "Peter of the Vineyard," a perversion of Saint Peter who, as Dante says in heaven, died for the vineyard that contemporary popes are laying waste (Pr. 18.131-32). Dante may well have known that members of Frederick's court called it the "ecclesia imperialis," of which Pier della Vigna was the Saint Peter, the rock upon which the imperial church was founded, sometimes in contrast to the "false vicar of Christ," the pope.[36] Pier della Vigna was the secretary of the emperor Frederick, whose name in Italian, Federico, can mean "rich in faith"; Dante has already seen Frederick in the circle of the heretics, so he too is a perversion of his name.[37] Pier boasts to Dante, not unlike the way Boniface boasts to Guido, that he held both keys to Frederick's heart and turned them, locking and unlocking to keep everyone else from his secrets (Hell 13.58-60). He claims to have kept "faith" with his "glorious" (a loaded word) office, but he abused his powers since an emperor's heart cannot belong to one individual. Allegorically, then, we may have a pope (Pier/ Peter) abusing the gifts of his office to serve a false faith (Federico/Frederick), and, on another level, the church using its powers (the keys) to interfere with the proper functioning of the empire; by so doing, by usurping control over the political sphere and interfering between the emperor and his people, the pope is committing spiritual suicide.[38]

Basic to all papal claims of universal jurisdiction is the notion of Christendom as one entity, a mystical body of which Christ, or his vicar on earth, is the head, a ship of which he is the pilot, a bride of whom he is the groom, a family of which he is the father, and a flock of which he is the shepherd. The imagery comes from the long tradition of biblical exegesis, but it runs through the papalist documents as well, and most of it is in Unam Sanctam. Dante uses all of it, twisting it to his own purposes in the Comedy, as in the political letters, which are undisguised political propaganda. Boniface describes the church as a single body with one head--Christ or his vicar, Peter and Peter's successors--and warns that a body cannot have two heads or it becomes a monster. Even antipapalists accept the image of the body and the one head, but they insist on that head being Christ (John of Paris, De potestate regia et papal 29, Quaestio, 103).[39] Bernard had used the image of the monster in a very different way, which Bonifacee does not take up; Bernard had said that Christ organized the church the way God wanted it, and any attempt on the pope's part to rearrange its members would be to create a monster (De consideratione, 3.17). Dante, however, presents the church not as a body, but as a chariot, an inanimate object which cannot move on its own; when the chariot takes on the eagle's feathers (imperial possessions), it begins to act like a body, but a monstrous one, sprouting heads and horns. Dante turns the church into the monster it has created.

The chariot is in itself a complex symbol, involving other aspects of the same themes; it may have been suggested by the wagons, which represented individual Italian cities at parlays and in triumphal processions,[40] but it is also an arca, which suggests both the ark of Noah and the ark of the covenant, which King David steadied on its journey (Pg. 10.56). Arca can also mean "coffer" (used figuratively in Pr. 23.131 ff.), implying that the church is the repository of treasure that was meant to be spiritual but is material to the popes in Hell and to Hadrian before his conversion (Pg. 19).[41] As the ark of Noah, it is also a boat, a traditional figure for the church, which must be properly guided if it is to save those it carries. When Beatrice appears on the chariot, she is like an admiral on a boat (Pg. 30.58-60) and when the eagle attacks it, it reels like a ship; when the eagle covers it with its feathers, a voice calls out from heaven "O navicella mia, come mal sei carca," "O my little boat, how badly loaded you are" (32.129).[42] Thomas calls the church the "barca di Pietro" (Pr. 11.119-20), which must be piloted by Francis and Dominic to save it from the corruption or neglect of the popes. It is possible that Ulysses' ship is also to be connected with the church, being led beyond its proper limits; Ulysses, like Adam, errs in "trapassar del segno," taking his followers beyond the bounds set by Hercules (Hell 26.107-09), leading them into damnation with false promises, as Boniface does. One of the promises made to Dante of divine intervention to set the church right is described in terms which recall Ulysses' end: "le poppe volgera u' son le prore" (Pr. 27.146: "he will turn the sterns to where the prows are," recalling Hell 26.137-42, "un turbo . . . fe . . . levar la poppa in suso/ e la prora ire in giu," "a storm ... made . . . the stern rise up and the prow go down").

One of the most popular figures for the church is the bride of Christ, from the Song of Songs, which is put to various uses in the political debate. Giles claims marital rights: since a clergyman is the husband of his church, he has a right to her possessions; that is, although the church's goods may belong to all the faithful, the priest, bishop, or pope, as her husband, has domination over them (2.1). Dante, as one would expect, emphasizes the marital abuses: the popes lead the church into adultery for gold and silver (Hell 19.3-4); they win it by deception and then outrage it (19.56-7); they pimp for it, turning it into a whore for kings (19.106-11, cf. Pg. 32.149 ff.). But, he reassures us, the whore will be killed by the eagle's heir (Pg. 33.37-45) and Rome will soon be freed of this adultery (Pr. 9.142). The bride of Christ, who paid for her love with blood (the sacrifice of Christ and the early martyrs, Pr. 27.40 ff.), will be restored. When Dante speaks of the bride of Christ in the Comedy, he usually means the whole assembly of the faithful, laity and clergy; the church bureaucracy by itself is a whore.[43]

The epithets most frequently used of the pope in papalist writings are "father" and "shepherd." When he speaks as a figure of authority to be revered, particularly addressing wayward princes, it is as a father: "Ausculta, fili carissimi, praecepta patris" (Boniface to Philip: "Listen, dear sons, to your father's precepts"). Giles says that all should call him most holy father ("omnes debent eum appellare sanctissimum patrem" 1.2).[44] Dante, in the Monarchy, acknowledges the pope's paternal position--the emperor owes him the reverence of a firstborn son to his father--but only after he has effectively denied him all authority outside the spiritual sphere. In the Comedy, however, the pope is called "father" only sarcastically, as when Dante calls the recipient of Constantine's gift "the first rich father" (Hell 19.117), and when Guido accepts Boniface's deceptive offer of absolution (Hell 27.108). Otherwise he reserves the title for those who actually guided him, the poets Virgil and Guido Guinizelli, and the saints Francis, Benedict, Peter, and Bernard.[45] God is the pio padre who should be the model for popes, but is not; they withhold the bread which the "pious father" denies no one (Pr. 18.128-29). Aeneas is a father to Rome (Hell 2.20-21), while the clergy is stepmother to the emperor (Pr. 16.58-59).

When he claims universal jurisdiction, the pope speaks as shepherd, based on John 2:16-17, "Feed my sheep." Boniface points out that Christ does not say "these" or "those" sheep ("has vel illas") but "mine," meas, by which he means all sheep, universally (cf. Giles, De ecclesiastica potestate, 2.4). Bernard had noted the shepherd's responsibility for his flock (De consideratione, 1.5); he should expel evil beasts so the flocks can pasture in safety (2.13); clergy of the past cared only for the sheep (4.3), now instead they adorn themselves in gold and colors; they pasture demons more than sheep (4.5) and dwell with wolves (4.6). Dante makes wide use of these images of wolves and sheep in the Comedy, and he uses the word "shepherd" again and again to underline all kinds of priestly abuses.[46] The wolf throughout the Comedy stands for greed, which will eventually be driven back to Hell by the veltro, a secular leader (Hell 1.101). The pope as "sommo pastore" should be protecting the sheep from that wolf, but instead he becomes a wolf, transformed by greed, and leads all the sheep and lambs astray (Pr.9.130-32). The church is filled with wolves in shepherd's clothing (Pr. 27.55-56), Peter comments with disgust. Nicholas III openly admits that his only care was for his own family (Hell 19.70-71); in his desire to enrich "the little bears," the orsati, he completely ignored the sheep. Peter Damian contrasts the poverty of the apostles with the moderni pastori, so heavy they have to be propped on their mounts; a mounted shepherd is in itself a strange picture and a fat one, ludicrous. Hadrian's greed is stemmed only when he becomes the roman pastore and has as much wealth as he desires (Pg. 19.103 ff.), that is, "Roman shepherd" is the equivalent of enormous wealth.

The Comedy is filled with examples of popes who guide their flocks in the wrong directions; it may be true that we are "men, not mad sheep" (Pr. 5.80), and should not allow ourselves to be led astray, but the bad example that is set where a good is expected can be very powerful: "color che sono in terra/tutti sviati dietro al malo essemplo" (Pr. 18.125-26: "those on earth are all gone astray after the bad example"). After all, God gave us, along with the Old and New Testaments, "il pastor de la Chiesa" to guide us (Pr. 5.76-77), but instead of guiding, he prostitutes the church. It is you pastors the Evangelist was thinking of when he saw the whore fornicating with kings, Dante rages at the simoniac popes (Hell, 19.106-08). These "shepherds" feed their flocks either selectively (like the bishop in Pg. 24.30, "who fed many with his staff," presumably his courtiers), or with the wrong food (wind, the nonsense preached by vain and ignorant preachers, Pr. 29.106-07); they indulge themselves, neglect their duty (Pr. 15.142-44, possibly Hell 20.67-69), or commit crimes, actively harming their flocks (like the empio pastor, the "impious shepherd," who betrays the Ghibellines who had taken refuge with him, Pr. 9.53). There is only one instance in the Comedy of the pope as shepherd leading a soul back to the faith, and that is a very early one: Justinian tells how Agapetus, the sommo pastore, led him out of heresy to the faith by his words (Pr. 6.17-18). Dante describes himself as the victim of wolves who make war on the sheepfold where he slept as a lamb, Florence (Pr. 25.4-6), but he also sees himself as a goat, watched over by the good shepherds, Virgil and Statius (Pg. 27.76-87). In this rather tender simile, the shepherds are poets, not priests, who wake through the night to guard their charge. (In Purgatory,20.139-41, Dante compares himself and Virgil to the shepherds who first heard the angel sing Gloria to announce the birth of Christ.) Dante, of course, takes on the function popes have abandoned of guide to Christendom when he becomes God's messenger in the poem.

The pope can no longer function as shepherd because he has joined the sword with the pastoral crook (Pg. 16.109-11). He attempts to rule the secular as well as the religious sphere without either the authority or the qualifications: "il pastor che procede/rugumar puo ma non ha l'unghie fesse" (Pg. 16.9899: "the shepherd who leads may chew the cud but does not have cleft hooves"), that is, he can mediate but not distinguish, so he leaves the world without its proper ruler, the king, who can discern at least the tower of the true city and can enforce the laws (16.94-96). The trouble began when Constantine moved the empire east to "yield to the shepherd" (Pr. 20.57), a particularly foolish move, since it was clear that God meant the empire to be Roman, and it is ludicrous to think of a shepherd replacing an emperor; the phrase may have been suggested by Clement's bull, Pastoralis cura, in which the "shepherd's care" is to oversee the vacant empire. Constantine's gift imposed a secular function on the pope which God had not intended, thereby distorting the one he had, the spiritual guidance of the shepherd. The force of the word shepherd, constantly repeated by Dante to point up the failures and abuses of episcopal responsibility, lies in the image it evokes of a being endowed with greater sense to watch over the weak and helpless, to defend them from their enemies, to see that they are fed and do not get lost. The shepherd is a figure with enormous responsibility but no tangible power or wealth; he is a wanderer in this world.

It is no accident that the shepherd is the only active image Dante uses for the pope, whereas the emperor is the husband of Rome (Pg. 6.112-14, but Rome is a widow), the horseman who should be in the saddle to keep mankind on the right road. The empire is itself an eagle, a living force, while the church is a chariot which must be driven to function properly. The only church symbol equivalent to the eagle as a living force is the bride of Christ, and in Dante's poem the bride usually represents the whole assembly of believers, while the curia by itself is a whore, prostituting God's gift of love. By turning their backs on the lessons of the gospels and the example of the early popes, recent popes have turned God's instrument for man's salvation, the church, into a monster and surrendered it to powers like the French king who use it for their own selfish ends. The only hope is the promise of a savior, the eagle's heir, who will kill the whore and the giant; that is, a new emperor who will destroy both the clerical and the secular enemies of mankind (Pg. 33.34-45), who will return the church to its proper function of spiritual guidance and remove it from the temptations of wealth and power which have corrupted it and endangered all mankind. We are assured that the church will not be allowed to continue on its corrupt course: in Purgatory, 33.34-36, Beatrice says that the vessel broken by the dragon (the chariot representing the church) "was and is not." The church, in other words, has been fundamentally changed, but the guilty party will soon feel God's revenge. In the heaven of Saturn, the souls of the contemplatives cry out a promise of God's imminent vengeance for ecclesiastical corruption that will come before Dante dies (Pr. 21.140-22.18).

The two major prophecies in the Comedy, the veltro in the first canto of Hell and the DXV in the last of Purgatory, are both ambiguous, presumably because Dante has to allow for variations in detail. But it is clear from both that Dante believes there will be a change for the better, that a reformer will come to set Europe straight, although he cannot be sure exactly when it will occur. There is a third prophecy which Dante must have considered equally important, simpler than the other two because it offers no enigmatic hints, but perhaps more reassuring because of its source and certainty. This is Peter's promise at the end of his condemnation of ecclesiastical corruption, that God, the High Providence that with Scipio defended the glory of the world at Rome, will soon send aid (Pr. 27.61-63).[47] What Virgil told Dante in Hell and Beatrice told him in Purgatory is repeated by the first pope in heaven, that God, working through the Roman empire, will put an end to the corruption which destroys the Christian world. Dante may not know who the veltro or the DXV is, but he must be a secular ruler, since Dante has proved in the Monarchy that only a universal monarch can bring peace and justice and in the Comedy that secular power in the church is by definition corrupt.

There has been a great deal of speculation about the nature and identity of the veltro and the eagle's heir, but the identity can never be definitively established; we can only make intelligent guesses on the basis of the material Dante gives us.[48] We know the veltro is an enemy of the wolf, and the wolf throughout the Comedy is greed, frequently identified with the church, particularly in Paradise where the shepherds become wolves (9.132, 27.55). The wolf s'ammoglia, "marries" many animals (Hell 1.100), the promiscuity within marriage suggesting the sexual abuses of Christ's bride by the popes, but the veltro will drive the wolf back to Hell.[49] The veltro might be a religious reformer (Dominic, for example, is associated with a dog, but he is long since gone and his effects no longer widely felt, Pr. 11.124 ff.), but he must also be the salvation of that Italy ("quella umile Italia") for which Cammilla, Euryalus, Turnus, and Nisus died, heroes of the struggle to found Rome, ancestors of the great pagan Roman tradition, who must be associated in any medieval reader's mind with the empire, if only from their presence in the Aeneid. The Ottimo makes that association clear, saying the veltro will be a universal lord, following Virgil in the sixth book of the Aeneid, where he tells us that Rome will rule without end (1.11). Davis ("Dante's Vision," 145), pursuing the same tack, suggests that Dante puts the prophecy in Virgil's mouth because it was the Aeneid which convinced him that "God had willed Rome's conquests and universal power . . . and had revealed this fact to Aeneas and to Virgil." Pietro Alighieri describes the veltro as an emperor who will reign like Augustus, over the whole world. He also identifies him with the Last World Emperor, and with the ideal man of Alanus de Insulis (45-46), another ambiguous figure with overtones of Christ, but an ideal human figure rather than a second coming; in later recensions, however, Pietro identifies the veltro explicitly with the DXV, as an emperor and leader who will control avarice, bring peace, and despoil prelates of their wealth.[50] Benvenuto says the veltro can be both Christ and a future prince who will repair the Roman empire (1.55-60).

If we are meant to connect the veltro with the DXV prophesied at the end of Purgatory, as seems most likely, the Roman identity becomes even stronger.[51] The DXV will be God's messenger, the heir of the eagle:

Non sara tutto tempo sanza reda
l'aguglia che lascio le penne al carro

ch'io veggio certamente...
...un cinquecento diece e cinque,
messo di Dio....

The eagle which left its feathers in the cart
will not always be without an heir

for I see with certainty...
...a five hundred, ten, and five,
messenger of God....

(Pg. 33.37-44)

Here the eagle is carefully identified with Constantine's donation; elsewhere, most notably in the sphere of justice in Paradise, the eagle is "the sign that made the Romans revered through the world" (Pr. 19.101-02); the eagle is also the bird of God ("uccel di Giove," Pg. 32.112, and "uccel di Dio," Pr. 6.4), the instrument of God. The Ottimo takes God's justice and the eagle's heir to mean that the empire will be restored and the judgment of God will take revenge on those who deceived it (2.583-84). Benvenuto calls the eagle's heir a "successor emperor" and points out that there was none at the time of Boniface (4.272). The Ottimo interprets the numbers of the eagle's heir, 500, 10, and 5, in their Roman equivalents, D, X, v, as an anagram for DUX, a leader sent by God who will bring the world back to God (2.584-85); he may come at the end of the world, but he will be a "most just and holy prince," who will reform the state of the church. One who will kill the whore and the giant (Pg. 33.44-45) is one who can not only thoroughly change the structure of the church, since the whore is the corrupt curia and is to be killed not cleansed, but one who can also destroy the powerful French king.[52] The only figure who would have the power and authority to destroy the bureaucracy of the church and the most powerful political figure in Europe would be a universal[ly accepted] emperor. It is tempting to connect the killing of the whore with Marsilius's reduction of the church to an organ of the state; although Dante never says so directly, it is possible, given his negative views on the secular powers and structure of the church, that, like Marsilius, he may have foreseen a time when the empire would control the bureaucarcy of the church and restrict it to its spiritual function.

Although it is futile to try and determine a distinct historical identity for the veltro or the eagle's heir, one can and perhaps should consider the hints Dante gives us. The veltro is a dog, an animal with little positive value in the Comedy, except in the name of Dante's future patron, Can Grande, who is alluded to with considerable enthusiasm in Paradise because of his great deeds and his magnificence (17.76 ff.). Can Grande's family, the Scaligeri, have as their emblem "in su la scala ... il santo uccello" (17.72: "the holy bird on the ladder"), in other words, they are identified with the eagle. Can Grande will also be an imperial vicar under both Henry VII and eventually Ludwig of Bavaria and will win important victories in their service, though those for Ludwig come after Dante's death. Dante alludes to Henry and Pope Clement's betrayal of him in the midst of the passage about Can Grande (Pr. 17.82). Certainly Can Grande is a likely candidate for the veltro, at least as one who might rescue Italy from the wolf.[53] He does not, however, have the political scope within Europe to be the eagle's heir who will kill the whore and the giant. If that figure is to be a contemporary, the only possible candidate is Ludwig, since Henry died before Dante had written a good part of the poem and he clearly had not solved Europe's problems. Davidsohn identifies Ludwig with the DXV on the basis of the sum of the three numbers, 515, which he adds to 800, the year Charlemagne brought the empire back to the West, giving him 1315, a significant date for Ludwig.[54]

It is not necessary to be quite so specific, particularly since no great changes of the kind Dante envisioned were apparent after 1315, but there are other connections to be made with the numbers. The eagle, when it appears in canto 18 of Paradise, rises out of the letter M, the end of the message spelled by the soul of the just kings, "Diligite Justitiam qui judicatis terram" (18.91-93). Well before we are given the whole message, however, we are told only the first three letters, D, I, and L, five hundred, one, and fifty (18.78). Since Dante also makes much of the fact that the message contains five words and five times seven letters, one must assume that five is somehow significant here, as it was in the enigmatic prophecy of Purgatory 33. As it happens, the first three letters of Ludwig's name in Latin, Ludovicus, are all fives, L, V, D (and the name also contains one, I, and one hundred, C). The coincidence of fives and ones may have suggested to Dante that Ludwig was to be the figure to oppose the beast of the Apocalypse, the 666.[55] Since Dante died long before Ludwig, it is at least possible that, as long as he was writing the Comedy, he cherished hopes of the great reformation to come from Ludwig, working with Can Grande.[56] Certainly Dante would have been taken with the fact that Ludwig's mother was a Matelda (daughter of emperor Rudolph I and namesake of the great Tuscan countess),[57] and that his wife was a Beatrice, both names connected with women who figure in Dante's personal salvation and who guide him to the Earthly Paradise, which the emperor is meant to restore for mankind. It is another interesting coincidence, though Dante would not have known it, that his Monarchy was burned as a result of Ludwig's march on Rome.

In this chapter, I have concentrated primarily on the church's abuse of its powers and functions, because that is what Dante emphasizes. What the church should be and do must be deduced mainly from what Dante tells us it should not be: it should not concern itself with wealth, except to distribute needed goods to the poor, and it should never interfere in political affairs--local or international.[58] It should spread God's message among non-Christians and guide Christians away from heresy or error. Its prime function for Dante seems to be to teach, by example or word. Apart from the earliest popes, who lived in poverty and died martyrs, the only churchmen who are praised in the Comedy or who can be looked to as good examples are the monks and friars, Benedict, Peter Damian, Francis, and Dominic, who renounced worldly things, although they continued to work in the world, and the great teachers, the scholars and theologians who appear in the circles of the Sun. Among the latter there is one pope, John XXI, but he is cited as a writer, Pietro Ispano, who still shines on earth in his twelve books. Dante does not even mention that he was pope, and he only served for eight months in any case, so what effect he had was as a scholar.[59]

Dante has presumably been influenced by the scholars and saints he names, and some of them lecture to him in heaven, but he does not choose any of them to guide him on his journey to God; his guides are a pagan poet, Virgil, and a woman, Beatrice (just as the two permanent human inhabitants of Purgatory are a pagan and a woman). It is Virgil, the poet of Empire, who leads Dante to the earthly paradise and crowns him emperor and pope over himself, and Beatrice, the woman and Christ figure, who leads him to heaven. In fact, Virgil and, to a lesser extent, other poets in the Comedy fulfill the functions of teacher and guide, which the church and the empire leave vacant. Dante, of course, takes on that role through his poem for his audience. Only for the last moment of the journey, the vision of God, does he choose a saint, Bernard, to guide him. Bernard is a mystic, devoted to Mary, and thus a suitable choice for the vision that Dante receives through her, but he is also a reformer and a political moderate (and something of a poet). It is no accident that the other churchmen with important roles in heaven, Thomas Aquinas, Peter Damian, Bonaventure, are also political moderates, men who recognize the need for a secular state and the practical separation of spheres (see chapter five).

The separation is essential to Dante's view of church-state relations; it is because the church interfered with the empire that Dante attacks it so fiercely, but that does not mean that he is blind to the faults of emperors. In fact, he condemns the man he considered the last functioning emperor in Italy, Frederick II, to Hell for heresy. This is a puzzling fact in some ways because Frederick was a significant force against the political ambitions of the papacy in Italy; he emphasized the Roman heritage of his title, he developed an efficient state, and he was a scholar and writer, all of which Dante admired.[60] That he was also accused of unorthodox beliefs is not enough to explain Dante's condemnation of him--Dante was ready enough to put others accused of heresy in Paradise. Perhaps what troubled Dante is that Frederick treated heresy as a crime against the state, as treason, and assumed all responsibility for it. This view is supported by a comment Benvenuto makes about the emperor, that he tyrannically usurped all spiritual matters, "omnia spiritualia tyrannice usurpavit" (3.443).[61] Frederick did what Dante objected to most strenuously in the popes, he claimed jurisdiction in the other sphere. He also kept Saracens and Jews as alien groups under his special protection and discouraged efforts to convert them (Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second 130-31), instead of extending Christendom, as Dante's ideal monarch would have done. One might expect Dante to condemn Constantine as well, since his ill-conceived gift to the church caused so much of the trouble, but he is in heaven, where he learns what a mistake he made. That act, he now knows, has just about destroyed the world, but his motives were pure (Pr. 20.58-60).

Apart from Frederick and Constantine, and the ineffective emperor Rudolph from Dante's period who is saved, though he did not attempt to restore order to Italy (Pg. 6.103-05,7.94-96), the emperors Dante sees--and they are many--are presented as model figures, while he sees only one model pope, and he was the first.[62] The emperors David and Trajan provide, along with the Virgin, the examples of humility sculpted by God on the first ledge of Purgatory; Justinian is inspired by God to reform the laws of the Roman empire (Pr. 6.11); Solomon is presented as the supreme figure of wisdom (Pr. 10). Of the six souls who represent divine justice in the eye of the Roman eagle, all are secular leaders, two are emperors, three kings, and four lived their lives as non-Christians: David and Hezekiah were Jews, Ripheus and Trajan pagans; only Constantine and William of Sicily were Christians. Trajan, of course, was supposed to have been brought back to life through the prayers of Pope Gregory so he could be baptized and die the second time as a Christian, but he lived and ruled as a pagan. Ripheus was baptized, we are told, by the theological virtues, as if even baptism were available outside the church. In fact, Dante suggests that the church is not essential to salvation, in contradiction to Boniface's claim; not only will those who believed in Christ-to-come be saved, an accepted view, but some who do not now know Christ directly will be closer to him than many who cry "Christ, Christ" (Pr. 19.106 ff.); the Ethiop will condemn such Christians at the Last Judgment.[63]

It is the empire, when the church does not intefere with it, that does God's will on earth; the emperor is the guide who can discern "the tower of the true city" (Pg. 16.96), the horseman who can control human nature with the bridle of law.[64]

It is the empire that provided the peace into which Christ could be born, the legal setting in which he could be condemned, and the force to avenge that death (Hell 2, Pg. 21, Pr. 6). Henry Vll, the divinely ordained emperor who will attempt, but fail, to save Europe, has a place waiting for him in God's rose, while the pope who opposed him, Clement, claiming power God did not grant him, is expected in Hell. Those who betrayed the empire, in the person of Julius Caesar, the first ernperor, are at the very bottom of Hell, literally in the mouths of Lucifer on either side of Judas, who betrayed Christ; their evil is on a level with the betrayer of Christ and the leader of the rebellion against God. With the three mouths occupied, there is no room for the betrayer of a pope, not because there were none, but because the pope is not on the same level of importance. Only the emperor is God's vicar on earth; the pope is Christ's as priest, but not as ruler.[65]

Such are the main views of church and state that can be extrapolated directly from the Comedy. They are quite consistent with Dante's positions in the Monarchy, which was written as an overt polemic for the empire: the need for a single monarch to rule the world, the providential choice of the Roman empire as that Monarchy, and the separation of church and state, with the secular power dominant in the temporal sphere. Dante's ideal is a world in which the emperor dispenses divine justice and the church dispenses knowledge and the sacraments. This is both a reactionary position, in that it is a return to the apostolic church and the ancient notion of empire, and a radical one, in that it proposes the reduction of power in national monarchies (the only ones with strong governments at the time), and a reduction if not abolition of the oldest functioning bureaucracy in the Christian world--the church. In order to convey this message, Dante turns away from the normal form of political debate, the ordered series of logical arguments, and takes up a potentially far more powerful weapon, the poetic vision. He casts the most important images and arguments from the controversy in poetic form where they take on new life: the chariot that becomes a monster before our eyes is far more effective than the statement that a figurative body with two heads would be a monster. And he places them in a setting that gives them the sanction of divine revelation: it is not just Dante who condemns the modern papacy, it is Saint Peter himself, on whom many of its claims were based; it is not Dante who defends the destiny of the Roman empire, it is God who sends the message of divine justice through the Roman eagle.

That Dante's message was not well-received by the church is made clear by the various attacks on it; though they do not always spell out the objections, the attacks do bear witness to the power of the poetry. The Dominican, Guido Vernani, at the beginning of his refutation of the Monarchy, takes a lengthy shot at the author's poetry, calling it a poisonous vessel of the father of lies, covered with false and fallacious beauty, by which the author, with poetic phantasms and figments, and the eloquence of his words, his siren songs, fraudulently leads not only the sick and ignorant, but even the learned (studious), to destroy the truth which might save them.[66] The reading or study of "poetic books composed in the vulgate by the one called Dante" was prohibited at the Dominican chapter at Santa Maria Novella in Florence in 1335, although it apparently continued to be popular among the frati; twenty years later, Jacopo Passavanti, in Specchio della vera penitenza, advises against reading worldly poets like Juvenal, Ovid, and Terence, for whom one scribe substituted Dante.[67] In the same period, Dante's poem was used in a political cause: another emperor came from Germany to be crowned in Rome in 1355, Charles of Bohemia, and much was made of Dante's prophecy of the veltro in connection with him, though he did not fulfill Ghibelline hopes.[68] A fourteenth-century inquisitor, Nicholas Eymerich, calls the doctrine of Christ's poverty the root of the troubles of his time (Matteini, Guido Vernani, 79), a doctrine Dante certainly advocates and which was condemned as heresy by John XXII in 1323, only two years after Dante's death. Cavallari cites a number of contemporary poems, by Dante's son, Pietro, and others, attempting to defend the orthodoxy of his beliefs (44 ff.) and one legend that the Friars Minor, angered by his attack in Paradise 12, tried to have him condemned as a heretic, which he forestalled by setting in terzine the Credo, the Ave Maria, the Pater Noster, the Sacraments and the Commandments (46). Questions had certainly been raised about Dante's orthodoxy. However, it is the political implications of his attacks on the church that seem to be the major irritant. Several passages from the Comedy were condemned by the Spanish Inquisition: Hell, 11.8-9, on the heresy of Pope Anastasius; Hell, 19.106-17, on the identification of the whore of the Apocalypse with the corrupt church and the Donation of Constantine; and Paradise, 9.136-42, another attack on the pope and the ecclesiastical hierarchy (Matteini, 48). Although the antipapal views expressed in the Comedy troubled many, they also gave the work a special appeal to conciliarists, who had the poem translated into Latin and commented by Giovanni da Serravalle at the Council of Constance (1414).[69]

It was, of course, the Monarchy (which was on the papal index from 1554 to 1881) that elicited the strongest and most direct attacks. This was due as much to the part it played in contemporary politics as to its arguments. It apparently influenced the supporters of Ludwig of Bavaria, after whose successful descent into Italy the attacks on the work began in earnest.[70] According to Boccaccio, the Monarchy was condemned by Cardinal Beltrando del Poggetto, papal legate of John XXII, because Ludwig had come to Rome against the pope's will and had himself crowned by his own pope using Dante's book in defense of his own authority; Beltrando then had the book condemned and burned for its heretical content ("si come cose eretiche contenente") and would have done the same to Dante's bones if he had not been stopped.[71] Little attention seems to have been paid the work before the break between Ludwig and Pope John XXII, but afterwards the attacks are frequent: two Franciscans, Guglielmo da Sarzano and Francesco di Meyronnes, writing between 1324 and 1328, do not name Dante but do attack the argument that imperial authority derives directly from God (Maccarrone, "Dante e i teologi," 23). Several of the errors imputed to Ludwig and his followers by John XXII are Dante's, and various people write about them without naming him but clearly having him in mind.[72] Probably the best known, certainly the most thorough, attack is the direct one by Guido Vernani, De reprobatione Monarchie composite a Dante, which rebuts Dante's arguments with little sympathy for the author, usually called "ille homo" (Matteini, Guido Vernani, 42). Guido wrote in direct response to Ludwig's conflict with the pope; indeed, it was Guido who announced the excommunication of Ludwig to the city of Rimini and explained the document to the clergy and the people (Matteini, 15). Many years later, in 1400, Guglielmo da Cremona wrote a Tractatus de iure Monarchie, turning Dante's thesis upside down to support universal monarchy but under the pope. Discussing the statement that Pilate justly executed Christ, Guglielmo calls its author "that nefarious man," "iste nefarius homo," and suggests that the book, with its author, be publicly consigned to the flames: "unde opus quod super hoc iste edidit, dico libera voce, cum suo autore publice ignibus esse tradendum."[73]

There is no question that Dante takes an extreme stand against secular power and wealth in the church, but Dante had seen what a worldly papacy could do in Italy, where it exercised some temporal power. He knew that by striving for more, well beyond its proper sphere, it had reduced itself to a virtual prisoner and tool of one ruler, thereby disrupting a delicate balance in the secular sphere and destroying its own ability to influence to good. The only way to return the church to the role God ordained for it was to remove it entirely from temporal affairs. To strip it of all temporal wealth and power was to restore its spiritual power. In the Comedy, even more forcefully than in the Monarchy, Dante argues for the empire as the ultimate world government, and for the church as the ultimate spiritual force, but to be such a force, the church must destroy the monster it has become and return to the purity of its origins.

Chapter 03, "The Corrupt Society"
by Joan Ferrante

THE PROPER RELATION of individual states (cities or kingdoms) to the empire and the separate and distinct functions of ecclesiastical and secular authority discussed in chapters one and two provide the political framework for the Comedy. Within that framework, each cantica presents a different but related model for human society. Paradise is the ideal society in all its essential elements working harmoniously; Purgatory is a society in transition, moving from self-centeredness to concern for and commitment to others, but not yet organized within an effective structure. Hell reveals what society is when all its members act for themselves and against the common good. The souls here are condemned not just for their selfish motivations but also for the effects of their actions on others.[01] Dante's point is that as civic beings, we are responsible not only for our actions, but also for their results. The people he presents were all men and women of prestige and/or power, people in a position to influence others either directly or by example, and in one way or another they all failed. The suffering, the violence, the anarchy of Hell are a result of their failure to act up to their responsibilities or their outright abuse of those responsibilities. Selfishness, greed for money, power, or pleasure, is the basis of the injustice that reigns in Hell, as charity is the basis of the justice that operates in heaven.

Bonaventure and Aquinas name four objects of love or sin: God, ourselves, our neighbors, and our bodies; Dante adds a fifth, our community. It is not that the theologians are not concerned with the effects of our actions on others, but that they are not primarily concerned with the public aspect of those actions, with their consequences for society as an entity.[02] Dante, in contrast, shows how all sins contribute to social disorder, not only the overtly disruptive sins of violence, fraud, and treachery but even those that seem most personal. Lust, gluttony, greed have sociopolitical overtones; even heresy and suicide are presented within a political context. Barratry (graft within the government) is placed in a lower section than simony (graft in the church) because corruption within the state has a greater effect on society; both are treated as aspects of fraud, that is, as social rather than religious sins. Flattery and hypocrisy are lower than robbery and murder (except for murder committed by treachery), not because in themselves Dante considers them more serious sins, but because their effects on society are more insidious and ultimately more damaging. Dante reverses Aquinas's consideration of theft and robbery: for Aquinas, theft, which is secret, is not as bad as robbery, which is open and violent and does more physical harm to its victim (ST, 2.2ae, q.66). The secrecy is what makes theft worse for Dante, since it opens the way to various kinds of injustice, like the incrimination of the innocent, and threatens economic stability in a much graver way. For Aquinas, blasphemy is also worse than murder or theft because it is a direct attack on God (ST, 1.2ae, q.73, a.3), but Dante places blasphemy in the seventh circle, theft far below it in the seventh section of the eighth circle.[03]

The most serious sins for Dante are those that deny the trust on which social and political relations are based-- fraud and treachery. Although treachery is the worst of all because of the special relation between "perpetrator" and victim, fraud is the one that occupies Dante's attention. He devotes thirteen cantos (from 18 to 30) to it, more than a third of Hell, and he subdivides it into ten different sections. It is not unusual to subdivide sins; the capital vices are normally discussed in terms of the sins they spawn.[04] But Dante differs in two ways from others who make the distinctions: (1) he presents the first five sins without any real subdivisions, (2) he moves into three sins which would normally be offshoots of others, violence, fraud, and treachery, and subdivides them, violence into three sections (the second with two parts, the third with three), fraud into ten (the tenth with four parts), and treachery into four. By introducing all these complexities, he is clearly calling attention to these sins, forcing us to shift the emphasis from the traditional moral view of greed and pride as the worst of evils to the more sociopolitical distinctions of violence, fraud, and treachery. The cantica seems to draw more from legal codes than manuals on vice; several of the punishments, particularly in the eighth circle, are based on contemporary penal codes. The very concept of Dante's Hell peopled with sinners well known to Dante's audience may itself be a reflection of the contemporary practice of painting the portraits of certain criminals on the walls of public buildings. [05]

Dante emphasizes the political message of Hell in other ways as well. One is the identification of specific places with sins. I suggested above in chapter one that Florence is presented as the central sinner throughout the cantica, but that in the lower parts of Hell other cities or regions of Italy share the stage; two classical cities, Thebes and Troy, also echo through Hell as emblems of selfdestructiveness and pride. Rivers are often used to identify cities and regions, suggesting the spread of corruption from one place to another,[06] and Dante uses dialect words particularly in the Malebolge to suggest the atmosphere of different regions. A more subtle way, perhaps, of underlining the interdependence of men in society is Dante's placing members of the same family in different parts of Hell (and in other cantiche for contrast). In a malfunctioning society, sinners seem to lead even their relatives into sin: the Navarrese barrator Dante sees in canto 22 is the son of a wastrel, the implication being that wasting oneself or one's goods leads naturally to abusing the government, which is an extension of the self. Michel Zanche, another barrator, was killed by his son-inlaw, who appears among the traitors to guests in the ninth circle, as though the deception of one's fellow citizens by the subversion of government led to the betrayal of still closer bonds. The bishop, Ruggieri, among the traitors, is a nephew of Cardinal Ottaviano, who is mentioned with the heretics, implying that the lack of faith in eternity facilitates the betrayal of faith to other men.[07]

In every way, Dante tries to show that we are responsible not only for our own actions, but for the effects they have on others; we are responsible not only for our own salvation, but for the good of our fellows. Dante moves in Hell from vices which seem to be personal and simple (although complications are revealed in them) to more and more overtly social faults. The victims become more numerous, from single individuals to large groups and even whole nations; the simple impulse to sin is replaced by the more complex manipulation of that impulse in others. We see the corrupt society built up from its basic element--the self-indulgent individual--and when we reach the center, we discover that the lowest sinner is not so different from the souls in the upper circles: Ugolino's story echoes Francesca's in many ways because the love that is dominated by lust can be as destructive to its object as hatred. For Dante, individual morality cannot be dissociated from social responsibility because the individual is a citizen, and to be a good individual, he must be a good citizen. Thus, to retrace the moral journey of the pilgrim through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, is to follow the journey of the citizen from a corrupt society, through the transition from selfishness to social responsibility, to his goal in the ideal society. The moral level of Dante's allegory is also the political level because it is impossible to be a moral human being without being a good citizen, and it is difficult to be either a good citizen or a moral person in a bad society. In Hell, Dante leads his pilgrim-persona step by step through a knowledge of what constitutes a corrupt society and a corrupt person and shows how even a basically good individual can be affected by the evil around him. By analyzing the structure of Hell, investigating each region in the order in which the pilgrim goes through it, since each sin has political implications, we can see how Dante reveals the hidden corruption that undermines society and how he unmasks the respected public figures. By the end, Dante's audience should understand what constitutes evil in a society as well as in an individual and be able to see the part we play in the evil around us.

The first point Dante makes in Hell is his own social responsibility. The pilgrim begins outside society in the woods,[08] alone, severed from all human connections, as Dante found himself in exile, banned under pain of death, cut off from his family, his city, and any public function. The inner man on his own is threatened by vice (the three animals), particularly greed (the wolf)[09] as the outer man is endangered by the enmity of Florence and the papacy (see chapter one). Aid comes in the form of a man who has all the public connections and purpose Dante lacks. Virgil is a poet, a Roman who served the highest form of political society, the empire, with his poetry. He must prepare Dante to become like him, a Roman and a poet of the empire. He is the first character in the Comedy to speak and he identifies himself by region, city, period, government, and role, bringing the poem abruptly from the moral allegorical into the real historical sphere. He was a Lombard, from Mantova, born under the emperor who formed and spread the empire, Julius Caesar;[10] he lived under Augustus, who established the peace in which Christ was to be born, and he sang of the "just" Aeneas, who brought the seeds of that empire to Italy. Virgil connects himself with the origin and high moments of the empire, and provides all the social identifications Dante so far lacks: nationality, citizenship, public function as poet. Virgil also prophesies the figure who will kill the wolf and send it back to Hell, the restoration of empire and reform of church (as Dante eventually learns, see chapter two), in which Dante's poem is to play an important role. Virgil will show Dante the way through Hell and Purgatory, but not to Paradise, not to the ideal society, because he was a rebel to God's law. The language of the outlawed rebel associates Virgil with Dante, who is historically in that position when he writes the poem, although he was not when the poem is supposed to take place. But Dante is in rebellion only against an unjust government of man, Virgil against the law of God: "quello imperador che la su regna/perch'io fui ribellante a la sua legge,/non vuol che in sua citta per me si vegna" (1.12426: "that emperor who reigns there will not allow any to enter his city through me, because I was a rebel to his law"). Virgil recognizes the authority of God and the rule of law with a metaphor drawn from the highest secular authority; this statement establishes from the very beginning of Hell that however attractive a soul in Hell may be, he or she is in rebellion against God's law. Virgil began his speech with the Roman empire on earth; he ends it with the empire in heaven, making a connection between the two which Dante will carry through the poem, reinforced by the souls in Paradise. The last to make the poem, reinforced by the souls in Paradise. The last to make the connection is Bernard, who points out at the end of the journey the main figures of "this most just and pious empire" (Pr. 32.117: "questo imperio giustissimo e pio"), recalling in his adjectives the hero of Virgil's poem.

It is because Virgil is a poet and Dante is a poet that heaven sent Virgil to guide Dante; his "parola ornata" will move Dante as Dante's must move his audience. What Dante does not recognize when he hesitates ("I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul," Hell 2.32), is that as the poet of the Christian empire, he has the same mission as Aeneas and Paul, as the state and the church. The allusions to their journeys establish certain important points. Aeneas is described in the first canto as the son of Anchises who came from Troy (1.74); in the second, he is the father of Silvio, Aeneas's son by Lavinia, the first Trojan born in Italy of an Italian race. God, the "enemy of all evil" (2.16)--God is always the enemy in Hell, as the emperor is in corrupt societies on earth--grants Aeneas the journey to the otherworld because of the "high effect" that is to proceed from him. He was chosen by heaven to be the father of Rome and of its empire (2.20-21), which was established as the seat of the papacy, "the holy place where the successor of the greatest Peter sits" (2.22-24). The empire had to prepare the way for the church. Long after Aeneas, Paul, also chosen by heaven, the "vas d'elezione," made his journey to the otherworld, but his mission was spiritual. What Aeneas learned in Hell was the cause of his victory and also of the papal mantle (2.2627); what Paul learned in heaven supported the faith that leads to salvation (2.29-30). The temporal institution of the church depends not on Paul but on Aeneas's heirs, which is why Dante takes fifteen lines to describe the reasons for Aeneas's journey and only three for Paul's. It is perhaps a coincidence, but the sort that would have assured Dante of the correctness of his position, that there is an Aeneas in the same chapter of the Acts of the Apostles in which Paul's conversion is described and in which Paul is called the "vas electionis" (Acts 9:15). This Aeneas is a man who has lain in bed with palsy for eight years, but Peter cures him saying, "Aeneas, the lord Jesus Christ healeth thee; arise, and make thy bed" (9:34). Can Dante have failed to understand this as meaning that the Christian faith restored the empire? Dante's mission, like Paul's, will be to spread the truth, to reform and restore both empire and church.

The first lesson Dante learns towards this mission after he enters Hell is the importance of making a commitment, the first step in social action; the neutrals, men and angels who never took sides, never made a public commitment.[11] Their failure is viltade (3.60), a baseness of spirit like Dante's hesitation (2.45), which is not humility, but a denial of God's gifts, a lack of courage to accept one's responsibilities. The neutrals lived for themselves alone, refusing to choose either good or evil and are therefore scorned by both heaven and hell, by mercy and justice (3.50) because they have done nothing to merit either. Cut off from all recognized human and divine laws, they are men without a country; the world has forgotten them (3.49), heaven and hell will not receive them. It is worse in Dante's view to take no part at all in civic life than to take the wrong part. Among them, Dante recognizes "the one who made the great refusal" (3.59-60: "colui/che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto"). Most early commentators take this to be Celestine V, whose abdication left the papacy to Boniface Vlll, one of the major villains of the Comedy.[12] It is quite possible that Dante does not name the figure because for him all those who refuse to act when called upon deny their own identities; the point is not just what you fail to do, but what you open the way to by your denial of responsibility.

There is one group of souls in Hell who chose good action, the inhabitants of Limbo, but they too failed in one crucial respect. They did not acknowledge the existence of God and therefore their action was not directed to his purpose. The moral life alone is not sufficient, it must serve the creation of the perfect society according to the divine plan. In every other respect, the three groups of virtuous pagans Dante sees together constitute an almost ideal society: the poets, who taught others the highest values and who accept Dante as one of them; the great spirits, who sacrificed themselves for country or principle; and the philosophers, who sought the truth. The last include moral and theological writers, scientists, and commentators; together they represent all aspects of human knowledge, but that is not sufficient to save them or to enable them to succeed. In the sun, Dante will see, side by side, philosophers who took opposing views now completing the figure of perfection, the circle, because they were all motivated by faith. The society of Limbo is peaceful, the only harmonious community in Hell, but it lacks joy because it lacks the deepest motivation for the good society, the salvation of its citizens. Of the four roles Dante recognizes in civil life (see Pr. 8.12426), craftsmen (and intellectuals), lawgivers (and statesmen), warriors, and priests, Limbo lacks the priests.

Beyond Limbo, Dante sees souls who felt no responsibility outside themselves; the next three sections of Hell are devoted to different kinds of selfish action: lust, gluttony, greed. But Dante makes it clear that the self is not the only victim. The circle of lust is filled with figures of great social responsibility, queens and princes, who chose indulgence of their passions over duty to their peoples. The queens are given a lot of attention by the early commentators, particularly Benvenuto da Imola, who details their great deeds as rulers as well as their vices (1.194 ff.). Semiramis twists the laws in order to cover her own guilt: "libito fe licito in sua legge" (5.56: "she made her libido licit in her law"), as if by changing a word she could obliterate morality, an attitude that is particularly disturbing in a guardian of the law. The next three queens were not only self-indulgent but also obstacles in one way or another to the Roman empire: Dido, who killed herself for love, leaving her land and people unprotected, also held Aeneas back temporarily from founding his dynasty in Italy; Cleopatra, also a suicide, had affairs with Caesar and Marc Antony which complicated the course of empire in her time; and Helen's affair with Paris caused the destruction of Troy, the old Rome. The only men named are Achilles, Paris, and Tristan, all princes: Achilles died ignominiously fighting over love, Paris and Tristan both stole the wives of kings, one of his host, the other of his uncle, and their affairs led to serious trouble for their countries. The violence such love engenders, spreading the effects of self-indulgence well beyond the immediate actors, is part of the responsibility they must now bear for their sin, which in life interfered with their fulfilling their assigned obligations as leaders of their people.[13]

The next stage of self-indulgence is to satisfy the body without even the excuse of a nobler impulse, simply to feed it as an animal does. Gluttony is so completely centered on the physical senses that it becomes virtually impossible for the gluttonous individual to give of himself, even with words, to others. This self-indulgence leads to a self-absorption that necessarily interferes with social exchange. The gluttons lose the power to act or to communicate with others. Dante finds it very difficult to get anything out of them; he has to keep coaxing "tell me, tell me": "Ma dimmi chi tu sei," 6.46, "ma dimmi, se tu sai," 6.60, "e dimmi la cagione," 6.62, "dimmi ove sono," 6.82, "ancor vo' che mi'nsegni/e che di piu parlar mi facci dono" (6.7778: "I still want you to instruct me and make me a gift of more speech"). But always the soul stops before Dante is satisfied: "e piu non fe parola," 6.57, "qui puose fine," 6.76; and finally the soul declares "piu non ti dico e piu non ti rispondo" (6.90: "I tell you no more and I answer you no more"), and falls back with the others.

For a city as for a man, overfeeding is self-destructive; more wealth and power than it can handle will first disrupt its natural processes and then destroy it. Florence, which is the subject of Dante's conversation with the glutton, and the way the soul first identifies himself, suffers from political gluttony, which is both greed and envy: "la tua citta, ch'e piena/d'invidia si che gia trabocca il sacco" (6.49-50: "your city, which is so full of envy that its sack overflows"), an image echoed in Purgatory, 20.7375, where Florence's paunch, presumably overstuffed, is burst by the lance of Charles.[14] Even its best men are flawed: all the Florentines Dante asks about, "who were so worthy," are lower down in Hell, and only two just men are left in the city, an allusion to Gen. 18:23 ff. where Abraham attempts to save Sodom on the basis of the just men in it and cannot find even ten.[15] As in Ezek. 14:14, the sins of the world are such that even the best men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, could only save themselves. The implication is that a modicum of virtue can stem the corruption of society, but the corruption of Florence is so great that its good men cannot save it.

Greed and gluttony are aspects of the same impulse, the amassing of more material than can be used. Like food, material wealth was intended by God to serve men's needs, but misuse of wealth is potentially harmful to one's fellows. What the miser hoards cannot serve others' needs. Fortune, which Dante the pilgrim sees as a monster holding the goods of the world in its "claws" (7.69), is in fact a minister of God, ordained to supervise the transmission of worldly goods and power from one people to another as well as from one family to another (7.73 ff.). In other words, the distribution of worldly goods and power seems random to man because he cannot understand it and wrongly blames fortune (7.9193), but it follows a divine plan, whereas the action of misers and prodigals on earth and in Hell, in their continuous semicircles, seems ordered, but is really futile or worse, because it runs counter to providence.[16] Thus greed, on the personal or public level, is a serious social sin for Dante because it interferes with the proper functioning of government and of providence. It is not accidental that the group Dante concentrates on in this section is identified by their tonsures; they are all churchmen, whose function was to give, not to possess, and to teach others the vanity of earthly goods.[17] They substituted the things of this earth for heaven in their own desires, a particularly serious sin in a cleric, who is supposed to reject temporal goods, but a common one, as Benvenuto notes (1.255-56) and as Dante stresses throughout the Comedy.

Dante follows a logical progression in sinful impulses from the indulgence of natural physical desires for sex and food to the indulgence of desires for less natural, but still necessary, goods like wealth, which is essential to social existence. The more the sins are centered on the self, the more hostile they render the individual to others. The glutton is only noncommunicative, the miser is aggressive. The rage that begins to surface in the circle of greed in the accusing shouts of the souls, but without a specific object, erupts in the next three circles against very specific objects, other people, the self, and God. It bursts out like the stream that has boiled underground but pours forth into the Styx (7.100-08). As we learn later, all the rivers of Hell are connected, just as tendencies to sin are connected, so the Styx must flow underground from the Acheron; in other words, wrath is latent in all the sins of self-indulgence, but after greed it comes to the surface and finds its object in another being. In the upper circles, the sins and sinners are wrapped up in themselves; from wrath down, there is much more interaction between the souls and between them and Dante. Filippo Argenti, who was a political enemy of Dante's, a Black and a member of the family which received Dante's confiscated goods after his exile, attacks Dante as he approaches the city, eliciting a fierce reaction from the pilgrim with Virgil's approval.[18] What Dante exhibits, in contrast to the soul's unprovoked hostility, is righteous indignation, a mean between the extremes of wrath and sloth, both of which are socially harmful: wrath strikes out wildly in any direction, sloth rejects action and turns inward, while proper anger, when guided by reason (Virgil), upholds the cause of good against its enemies.[19] Filippo's wrath is a threat to his society; Dante's is essential to its proper functioning. Dante consciously aligns himself with divine justice and against the attacking soul, making it clear, as he has not before, that he is an alien in Hell.

This change in Dante's attitude heralds a change in the entire presentation. The scene is dramatic, with a much larger cast of active characters than has been seen heretofore, and the atmosphere is much more overtly civic. Beginning with the exchange of signals between towers, which suggests a hostile setting, the approach of an alien, perhaps an enemy, as Benvenuto notes (1.275-76), we are aware of entering a more structured, more complicated organization than Dante has encountered before, indeed a city. In the earlier circles, there were guards who objected ineffectually to his presence. Now there is sophisticated communication among beings he cannot see. He is about to enter the inner city of Hell, the city of Dis, "wealth," in which greed dominates, with its gravi cittadin-- the serious citizens of Hell--its "army" of devils, and its mosques, a city of infidels whose citizens work to deceive and exploit each other. Dante and Virgil enter this city as hostile aliens, although Virgil is himself an inhabitant of Hell, a fellow countryman from a different region, so to speak; for Dante, the experience is one he lived in his own life, an alien everywhere but in Florence, where he was an unwanted outlaw. If the devils who guard the city gates represent corrupt churchmen, as suggested in chapter two, it is clear why Dante sees them as dangerous enemies; in any case, fallen angels are rebels who try to close the city to representatives of the true emperor, God, just as Florence, with the church's support, closed its gates to Henry and to Dante. Dante perhaps will be the divine messenger who with a seemingly small weapon, his poem, like the angel's wand, will open them again. The action of the fallen angels is, of course futile; they cannot shut this gate against the divine will. Their whole rebellion won them only the loss of heaven, not even the control of their own domain, which, like the Italian cities that defy the emperor, is filled with chaos and self-destructive violence. The angel who brings divine help asks the devils why they bother to resist a will that cannot be thwarted, an action which can only increase their pains, 9.94-96. That is an important question for Dante and the reader to ponder before entering the lower circles where the sins are a conscious and continuous affirmation of evil and rejection of God, but it is also a reminder to Florence that, however successful it may be at thwarting the emperor temporarily, the divine will must ultimately prevail on earth as in Hell.[20]

The city of Dis is the core of the corrupt society. Inside it, Dante concentrates on four large categories of sin, those which are the most socially destructive: (1) heresy, the limited or distorted truth, which prevents acceptance of the larger truth and kills the soul, is the equivalent of factionalism in politics, the narrow view that destroys the body politic; (2) violence, the flouting of the most basic natural laws which rule men in their relations with others, with them