A Poem That Puts Popes in Hell

The Commedia is a work of judgement and a great deal of what it judges is the church. Boniface VIII is expected in the circle of the simoniacs before he has even died, addressed by a predecessor already there who mistakes the pilgrim for him. The Donation of Constantine, still taken as genuine, is condemned not as a forgery but as a catastrophe, the moment wealth entered the church and spoiled it. Dante argued the political case separately in the Monarchia, holding that imperial and papal authority both come from God directly and that neither derives from the other, and that book was condemned after his death.

The generosity is as pointed as the severity. Siger of Brabant, whose Aristotelianism had been formally condemned at Paris, stands among the wise in the sphere of the sun and is introduced by Thomas Aquinas, who had argued against him in life. Cato, a pagan and a suicide, guards the shore of Purgatory. Virgil, who can go exactly as far as reason goes and no further, hands the pilgrim over to Beatrice at the summit and returns to Limbo without protest. Writing the whole thing in Tuscan rather than in Latin was a decision of the same kind, and it did more than any other single book to make Italian a language in which serious matters could be argued.