The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: The Inferno

CANTO XIX.

O Simon Magus![534] ye his wretched crew!
The gifts of God, ordained to be the bride
Of righteousness, ye prostitute that you
With gold and silver may be satisfied;
Therefore for you let now the trumpet[535] blow,
Seeing that ye in the Third Bolgia ’bide.
Arrived at the next tomb,[536] we to the brow
Of rock ere this had finished our ascent,
Which hangs true plumb above the pit below.
What perfect art, O Thou Omniscient,10
Is Thine in Heaven and earth and the bad world found!
How justly does Thy power its dooms invent!
The livid stone, on both banks and the ground,
I saw was full of holes on every side,
All of one size, and each of them was round.
No larger seemed they to me nor less wide
Than those within my beautiful St. John[537]
For the baptizers’ standing-place supplied;
And one of which, not many years agone,
I broke to save one drowning; and I would20
Have this for seal to undeceive men known.
Out of the mouth of each were seen protrude
A sinner’s feet, and of the legs the small
Far as the calves; the rest enveloped stood.
And set on fire were both the soles of all,
Which made their ankles wriggle with such throes
As had made ropes and withes asunder fall.
And as flame fed by unctuous matter goes
Over the outer surface only spread;
So from their heels it flickered to the toes.30
‘Master, who is he, tortured more,’ I said,
‘Than are his neighbours, writhing in such woe;
And licked by flames of deeper-hearted red?’
And he: ‘If thou desirest that below
I bear thee by that bank[538] which lowest lies,
Thou from himself his sins and name shalt know.’
And I: ‘Thy wishes still for me suffice:
Thou art my Lord, and knowest I obey
Thy will; and dost my hidden thoughts surprise.’
To the fourth barrier then we made our way,40
And, to the left hand turning, downward went
Into the narrow hole-pierced cavity;
Nor the good Master caused me make descent
From off his haunch till we his hole were nigh
Who with his shanks was making such lament.
‘Whoe’er thou art, soul full of misery,
Set like a stake with lower end upcast,’
I said to him, ‘Make, if thou canst, reply.’
I like a friar[539] stood who gives the last
Shrift to a vile assassin, to his side50
Called back to win delay for him fixed fast.
‘Art thou arrived already?’ then he cried,
‘Art thou arrived already, Boniface?
By several years the prophecy[540] has lied.
Art so soon wearied of the wealthy place,
For which thou didst not fear to take with guile,
Then ruin the fair Lady?’[541] Now my case
Was like to theirs who linger on, the while
They cannot comprehend what they are told,
And as befooled[542] from further speech resile.60
But Virgil bade me: ‘Speak out loud and bold,
“I am not he thou thinkest, no, not he!”’
And I made answer as by him controlled.
The spirit’s feet then twisted violently,
And, sighing in a voice of deep distress,
He asked: ‘What then requirest thou of me?
If me to know thou hast such eagerness,
That thou the cliff hast therefore ventured down,
Know, the Great Mantle sometime was my dress.
I of the Bear, in sooth, was worthy son:70
As once, the Cubs to help, my purse with gain
I stuffed, myself I in this purse have stown.
Stretched out at length beneath my head remain
All the simoniacs[543] that before me went,
And flattened lie throughout the rocky vein.
I in my turn shall also make descent,
Soon as he comes who I believed thou wast,
When I asked quickly what for him was meant.
O’er me with blazing feet more time has past,
While upside down I fill the topmost room,80
Than he his crimsoned feet shall upward cast;
For after him one viler still shall come,
A Pastor from the West,[544] lawless of deed:
To cover both of us his worthy doom.
A modern Jason[545] he

[534] Simon Magus: The sin of simony consists in setting a price on the exercise of a spiritual grace or the acquisition of a spiritual office. Dante assails it at headquarters, that is, as it was practised by the Popes; and in their case it took, among other forms, that of ecclesiastical nepotism.

[535] The trumpet: Blown at the punishment of criminals, to call attention to their sentence.

[536] The next tomb: The Third Bolgia, appropriately termed a tomb, because its manner of punishment is that of a burial, as will be seen.

[537] St. John: The church of St. John’s, in Dante’s time, as now, the Baptistery of Florence. In Parad. xxv. he anticipates the day, if it should ever come, when he shall return to Florence, and in the church where he was baptized a Christian be crowned as a Poet. Down to the middle of the sixteenth century all baptisms, except in cases of urgent necessity, were celebrated in St. John’s; and, even there, only on the eves of Easter and Pentecost. For protection against the crowd, the officiating priests were provided with standing-places, circular cavities disposed around the great font. To these Dante compares the holes of this Bolgia, for the sake of introducing a defence of himself from a charge of sacrilege. Benvenuto tells that once when some boys were playing about the church one of them, to hide himself from his companions, squeezed himself into a baptizer’s standing-place, and made so tight a fit of it that he could not be rescued till Dante with his own hands plied a hammer upon the marble, and so saved the child from drowning. The presence of water in the cavity may be explained by the fact of the church’s being at that time lighted by an unglazed opening in the roof; and as baptisms were so infrequent the standing-places, situated as they were in the centre of the floor, may often have been partially flooded. It is easy to understand how bitterly Dante would resent a charge of irreverence connected with his ‘beautiful St. John’s;’ ‘that fair sheep-fold’ (Parad. xxv. 5).

[538] That bank, etc.: Of each Bolgia the inner bank is lower than the outer; the whole of Malebolge sloping towards the centre of the Inferno.

[539] Like a friar, etc.: In those times the punishment of an assassin was to be stuck head downward in a pit, and then to have earth slowly shovelled in till he was suffocated. Dante bends down, the better to hear what the sinner has to say, like a friar recalled by the felon on the pretence that he has something to add to his confession.

[540] The prophecy: ‘The writing.’ The speaker is Nicholas III., of the great Roman family of the Orsini, and Pope from 1277 to 1280; a man of remarkable bodily beauty and grace of manner, as well as of great force of character. Like many other Holy Fathers he was either a great hypocrite while on his promotion, or else he degenerated very quickly after getting himself well settled on the Papal Chair. He is said to have been the first Pope who practised simony with no attempt at concealment. Boniface VIII., whom he is waiting for to relieve him, became Pope in 1294, and died in 1303. None of the four Popes between 1280 and 1294 were simoniacs; so that Nicholas was uppermost in the hole for twenty-three years. Although ignorant of what is now passing on the earth, he can refer back to his foreknowledge of some years earlier (see Inf. x. 99) as if to a prophetic writing, and finds that according to this it is still three years too soon, it being now only 1300, for the arrival of Boniface. This is the usual explanation of the passage. To it lies the objection that foreknowledge of the present that can be referred back to is the same thing as knowledge of it, and with this the spirits in Inferno are not endowed. But Dante elsewhere shows that he finds it hard to observe the limitation. The alternative explanation, supported by the use of scritto (writing) in the text, is that Nicholas refers to some prophecy once current about his successors in Rome.

[541] The fair Lady: The Church. The guile is that shown by Boniface in getting his predecessor Celestine v. to abdicate (Inf. iii. 60).

[542] As befooled: Dante does not yet suspect that it is with a Pope he is speaking. He is dumbfounded at being addressed as Boniface.

[543] All the simoniacs: All the Popes that had been guilty of the sin.

[544] A Pastor from the West: Boniface died in 1303, and was succeeded by Benedict XI., who in his turn was succeeded by Clement V., the Pastor from the West. Benedict was not stained with simony, and so it is Clement that is to relieve Boniface; and he is to come from the West, that is, from Avignon, to which the Holy See was removed by him. Or the reference may simply be to the country of his birth. Elsewhere he is spoken of as ‘the Gascon who shall cheat the noble Henry’ of Luxemburg (Parad. xvii. 82).—This passage has been read as throwing light on the question of when the Inferno was written. Nicholas says that from the time Boniface arrives till Clement relieves him will be a shorter period than that during which he has himself been in Inferno, that is to say, a shorter time than twenty years. Clement died in 1314; and so, it is held, we find a date before which the Inferno was, at least, not published. But Clement was known for years before his death to be ill of a disease usually soon fatal. He became Pope in 1305, and the wonder was that he survived so long as nine years. Dante keeps his prophecy safe—if it is a prophecy; and there does seem internal evidence to prove the publication of the Inferno to have taken place long before 1314.—It is needless to point out how the censure of Clement gains in force if read as having been published before his death.

[545] Jason: Or Joshua, who purchased the office of High Priest from Antiochus Epiphanes, and innovated the customs of the Jews (2 Maccab. iv. 7).

[546] Punished well: At line 12 Dante has admired the propriety of the Divine distribution of penalties. He appears to regard with a special complacency that which he invents for the simoniacs. They were industrious in multiplying benefices for their kindred; Boniface, for example, besides Cardinals, appointed about twenty Archbishops and Bishops from among his own relatives. Here all the simoniacal Popes have to be contented with one place among them. They paid no regard to whether a post was well filled or not: here they are set upside down.

[547] Charles: Nicholas was accused of taking a bribe to assist Peter of Arragon in ousting Charles of Anjou from the kingdom of Sicily.

[548] By reverence, etc.: Dante distinguishes between the office and the unworthy holder of it. So in Purgatory he prostrates himself before a Pope (Purg. xix. 131).

[549] Her spouse: In the preceding lines the vision of the Woman in the Apocalypse is applied to the corruption of the Church, represented under the figure of the seven-hilled Rome seated in honour among the nations and receiving observance from the kings of the earth till her spouse, the Pope, began to prostitute her by making merchandise of her spiritual gifts. Of the Beast there is no mention here, his qualities being attributed to the Woman.

[550] Ah, Constantine, etc.: In Dante’s time, and for some centuries later, it was believed that Constantine, on transferring the seat of empire to Byzantium, had made a gift to the Pope of rights and privileges almost equal to those of the Emperor. Rome was to be the Pope’s; and from his court in the Lateran he was to exercise supremacy over all the West. The Donation of Constantine, that is, the instrument conveying these rights, was a forgery of the Middle Ages.

Clyx.com