Canto XIX

Dante hates the Church and nepo-babies

Dante hates the Church. Yes, he did write a poem about man’s journey toward God through the realms of the afterlife. But I’ve always thought of him as spiritual rather than religious. Of course when I say “spiritual” I mean Christian, but not in the submissive and unquestioning way of indoctrinated Catholics. For instance, according to medieval Christian tradition hell was one nondescript fiery pit where everyone agonized in the same way. None of this stratification business. And purgatory wasn’t a place of self-denial and expiation through relentless singing (it makes more sense than this, I promise), but more something the Church had come up with to get people to pay them for easy access to heaven. Which is why Dante hates the Church. Well, one of the official reasons, anyway.

Canto 19 adds a tragic note as well as a sense of urgency to the admonishing tone and comical language of the previous one. The opening verse already tells us that the people here are being punished for committing simony, which is the act of selling objects or services connected with the spiritual sphere, as well as selling ecclesiastical positions or employing people in the Church based on personal connections - yes, nepotism has been around for a while. To give you a better idea of why something that to the modern reader is unethical at its worst and a rather imaginative business endeavour at best is such a serious sin to the Dante reader of the 1300s, I have to give some background.

The sin is named “simony” after Simon Magus, a guy from the Acts of the Apostles (a book in the New Testament), who as his name suggests was some sort of sorcerer or other but eventually saw the error in his ways and converted to Christianity. But much like the proverbial wolf, Simon changed his habit but not his nature, and, impressed by the healing powers of the apostles, he offered them money in exchange for this gift. The apostles refused, of course, and Simon has since been remembered as the first man who tried to buy the grace of God.

At the time that Dante writes, paying clerics to pray for you or your dead ones as well as buying indulgences (a sort of pardon for some of your sins so you had less to atone for in purgatory and would move on to paradise quicker) was a popular practice among noblemen.

Dante has a problem with this for two reasons.

From a moral perspective, the commodification of spiritual life is obviously deplorable to him. God left the Church in charge of his kingdom on Earth and priests as custodians of the spiritual well-being of humanity. For them to then capitalise on this is more than simply against God’s will, it is an adulteration of it. The idea sacred matters are being “whored out” is made explicit in the opening verses of the canto

Things that are God’s own - things that, truly, are

the brides of goodness - lusting cruelly

After gold and silver, you turn them all to whores.

This intro signals already that the poet’s contempt for the sinners found in pocket 3 of the 8th circle is no longer the detached disgust we saw him display towards the people of the previous two pockets. It is now charged with an anger the root of which will only be revealed in verse 53.

For now, we are presented with the landscape, a circle made of grey, dry stone and riddled with holes all over the floor and walls. The description of the holes (in radius, no more nor less than fonts […] in my own beloved Saint John, v.16-7) gives way to a rare autobiographical detail (I realize you could argue all of Dante’s work is autobiographical). There was a story that as a young boy Dante was in the Baptistry of Florence with a bunch of other young people of different ages. It’s unclear why they were there, but the story goes that one of them fell in one of the founts where priests baptized babies and that, in order to save him, Dante broke the pit where the priests would stand. In one version of this story that circulated in Florence, Dante was said to have broken it as a random act of vandalism and he takes this opportunity to set the record straight.

But back to the holes. Each of them contains a sinner, head and body in the hole, and legs sticking out. The soles of their feet are on fire and they desperately wriggle and kick with their feet to relieve the pain.

The contrapasso is pretty simple. These men, whose heads and hearts should have gravitated upwards, towards God are now upside down. The flames, a symbol of the Holy Spirit, that should have warmed their hearts now scorches their feet.

Note the similarity between this punishment and that of the heretics, who were laid down in open tombs with flames blazing out of them. The parallel between simony and heresy is then made explicit in verses 112-4, where we read:

Silver and gold you have made your god. And what’s

the odds - you and some idol-worshipper?

He prays to one, you to a gilded hundred.

Among the sea of kicking burning feet, Dante sees one that seems to move faster, as if his pain is greater. He approaches the hole and addresses the sinner.

The image we’re presented with here is a personal favourite.

So there I stood like any friar who shrives

the hired assassin - head down in the earth -

who calls him back to put off stifling death.

The poet refers to the practice of execution via the burial of the victim’s head. There’s a lot to unpack. The sinner, we find out later, is a pope but is likened to a “hired assassin”, a lexical choice that solidifies this idea of simonist priests as mercenaries rather than men of God. This reversal is reflected also in the reversal of roles between the former aspiring saint (many cardinals and popes would be beatified after death) and the sinner (Dante’s entire journey is a consequence of his having “lost his way” in the spiritual sense).

Upon hearing Dante’s voice, the sinner - who turns out to be - Pope Nicholas III, mistakes Dante for his successor, Pope Boniface VIII. Nicholas reveals that all the previous popes who were guilty of simony are squeezed deep into the hole beneath him and that, once the following simonist pope dies and comes to hell, Nicholas himself will join them and it will be the new pope’s turn to have his feet on fire. This case of mistaken identity allows Dante to criticise Boniface VIII, who was responsible for his exile from Florence.

And here we have the other reason why simony is such a grave sin for Dante. As we’ve discussed previously, Dante belonged to the White Guelphs, a political faction that advocated for the separation between Church and State (among other things) and supported the power of a king/emperor who could unite all the existing city-states into a single Italian nation. The accumulation of economic power by the Church made it a worthy political adversary to the king - or at least Dante’s preferred candidate for king - through its constant meddling and championing of politicians it had personal ties with. Hence Dante’s incensed rant against the obsession with money, and therefore power, of the Catholic Church.

He, of course, doesn’t say all this. Instead, he makes an impassioned speech in which for the first time we see him tell a sinner that they deserve their pain.

Tell me, I pray: what riches did Our Lord

Demand, as first instalment, from Saint Peter

before He placed the keys in his command?

He asked (be sure) no more than: “Come behind me.”

[…]

So you stay put. You merit punishment.

This attack is followed by a general lamenting of the corruption of the Church, the origins of which he attributes to the endowment that Emperor Constantine made to the Church after he was converted to Christianity. According to the document (which has since Dante’s time been proven to be a forgery), the emperor had donated the temporal power over the western part of his empire to the Catholic Church.

The last verses of the canto see a gradual descent from this climax. Dante and Virgil climb down from the spot where Nicholas’s hole was and they proceed into the next pocket.