Clavis Libri

Questions · Inferno

Are there popes in Dante's Inferno?

Yes. Dante places popes in Hell and is harsh toward the Church of his time. The clearest case is that of the condemned man in a hole in the ditch of the simoniacs, in Canto XIX, whom tradition identifies as Pope Nicholas III, and who awaits Boniface VIII to take his place. The simoniacs sell what is sacred for gold and silver, and they stand head down in holes of stone, with the soles of their feet aflame.

Dante answers him with the harshest accusation in the poem: you have made gold and silver into a god, and what else separates you from idolaters, except that they worship one and you worship a hundred? He blames Constantine, not for the conversion, but for the dowry the Church received from him. Only reverence for the supreme keys stops him from going further. Virgil, pleased, takes him in his arms.

In Canto XXVII, Guido da Montefeltro tells that the pope, whom the poet calls the prince of the new Pharisees and whom the usual reading identifies with Boniface VIII, offered him absolution before the sin, in exchange for counsel on how to take Penestrino, saying that he could lock and unlock heaven. A devil undoes the promise: one does not absolve whoever does not repent, nor can one repent and will at the same time.

Finally, in the vestibule, there is the shade of the one who made the great refusal out of cowardice; tradition links it to Pope Celestine V, who resigned in 1294, but the poem does not name him.

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