Inferno · Canto XIX ·
Inferno XIX — The Baptismal Bolgia
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 19 of 100 · Inferno, Canto XIX
Before reading
This is the canto of the simoniacs — those who bought or sold sacred office for money — and it is the most directly political canto in the Inferno. The pilgrim looks into the third bolgia, finds it perforated like the baptismal font of his own city, sees the feet of an upside-down sinner sticking out of one of the holes with the soles on fire, climbs down, and proceeds to denounce — by name, by office, and by anticipated successors — the contemporary Roman papacy. Read the canto knowing that Dante is writing in exile and that the Pope he attacks is the man directly responsible for that exile.
Where the canto sits
The third bolgia. The eighth circle's ten ditches are being walked in order, and this is the third. The previous canto (panders, flatterers) used Italian and classical examples in roughly equal weight; from here on, the Inferno turns increasingly toward the contemporary Church and the contemporary Italian state. The canto is also the Inferno's only direct papal attack — Dante will continue to anathematise Boniface VIII across the rest of the poem, but here in canto XIX the attack is delivered in person, to a pope's roasting feet.
What it helps to know
The sin is named after Simon Magus, the Samaritan magician of Acts 8 who offered the apostles money for the power to confer the Holy Spirit and was rebuked by Peter. Simony — the buying or selling of ecclesiastical office, of indulgences, of sacraments — was, throughout the Middle Ages, a chronic and infamous corruption of the institutional Church. Dante's own city had repeatedly been pulled into Roman papal politics by simoniacal manoeuvres, and his exile from Florence in 1302 was the direct result of one such manoeuvre by Boniface VIII.
The punishment is built from a parodic inversion of the rite of baptism. The damned are planted upside-down in stone fonts — the canto explicitly compares them to the holes for the priest's footing in the baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence — with their feet sticking up in the air and the soles on fire. The simoniacs are baptised into hell-fire from the wrong direction. The image is Dante's invention.
The pope the pilgrim addresses is Pope Nicholas III (Giovanni Gaetano Orsini, pope 1277–1280), of the great Roman Orsini family. Orsini means bear, and Nicholas himself describes his nepotism in those terms: son of the She-bear, so eager to advance the cubs. He was widely held to have used the papacy to enrich his family. He is, however, only one of three popes the canto damns. Beneath him, Nicholas reports, lie further simoniacal popes already in the same hole; and above him — that is, after him in time, since the simoniacs of Hell sink as their successors arrive — Nicholas predicts the imminent arrival of Boniface VIII (pope 1294–1303). Boniface was still alive when Dante wrote. And after Boniface, Nicholas predicts, will come Clement V (pope 1305–1314), the French pope who in 1309 moved the papal court from Rome to Avignon — described here, before the move, as a Pastor without law from the west, the New Jason of the Maccabees, who will be as compliant to King Philip IV of France as the second-century BC Jason was to the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes. Three popes damned in one canto, two of them still alive when the canto was written.
The canto closes on Constantine — the first Christian emperor — and on the Donation of Constantine, the supposed document by which Constantine, on his conversion in the fourth century, transferred temporal sovereignty over the western empire to Pope Sylvester I. Dante believed the Donation to be a genuine document (its forgery would not be demonstrated until Lorenzo Valla, a century and a half later) and held it to be the original poisoning of the Church — the moment at which the papacy acquired temporal power and thereby corrupted itself. The final tercet of the canto is one of the Inferno's great cries against the historical fusion of Church and State.
What to read for
Listen to the register of the pilgrim's speech in this canto. He is no longer the trembling tourist of the upper Hell. He stands over the burning feet of a pope and delivers a prepared sermon. The voice of the Inferno's Dante is hardening — and notice that Virgil approves, taking the pilgrim back up to the next bridge tenderly and listening to the speech with contented lip.
Listen for the canto's confessor simile. The pilgrim describes himself as standing over the upturned pope the way a friar bends over a confessed assassin about to be executed by being buried alive head-first. The simile assumes a specific Italian punishment — propagginazione — and the assassin's trick of calling the friar back to delay the burial. The simile is sour and exact.
And notice the canto's most political single image: the Whore of Babylon of Revelation 17, transferred without disguise from the pagan empire to the contemporary Roman Church. The Apocalypse, Dante says, was foretelling the corrupt papacy.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
The canto delivered the Inferno's most direct papal attack and one of the Comedy's most authored small architectural inventions. The third bolgia is described in deliberate detail — a stone enclosure perforated, on floor and walls, with circular fonts identical (the canto says) to the fonts of the baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence, with the simoniacs planted in them upside-down and the soles of their feet on fire. The canto's argument is delivered in two parts: first the architecture, then the speech. The architecture is the parody: the men who corrupted the sacrament of office are baptised into eternal fire from the wrong direction. The speech is the indictment: Dante, standing in the posture of a confessor over the protruding feet of Pope Nicholas III, delivers a denunciation of contemporary papal avarice that names three popes (one dead, one alive, one not yet elected) and traces the corruption back to the Donation of Constantine. The canto closes on Virgil carrying the pilgrim back up the crag in his arms. The lower Hell has begun to look like a place in which the master must physically lift the pupil out of his own anger.
What the architecture is
The simile of the baptistry is the central image. Dante's bel San Giovanni — the eleventh-century baptistry across from the Florentine cathedral — had stone fonts set into the floor for the priest's feet during the baptismal rite, fonts of just the size to receive a man's leg if a man were inserted head-first. The canto pauses to digress: not many years ago I broke one of these for someone who was drowning in it; be this a seal all men to undeceive. The aside is one of the Inferno's strangest small autobiographical interventions — Dante apparently broke a baptismal font to free a man who had got stuck head-down in it, and was accused by some Florentines of sacrilege. The aside is here to set the record straight, in the middle of the most anti-clerical canto in the poem. The pilgrim has authority to denounce the papacy in part because he himself was once accused of damaging a sacred font and was, he insists, saving a life.
The punishment's logic is the doctrinal point. Baptism makes the Christian a son of the Church; simony makes the Church into a commerce. The inversion of the rite is therefore physical: the head is in the stone, the feet are in the air, the fire that should descend in tongues at Pentecost descends in flame on the soles instead. The simoniacs are anti-Christ-ened.
The three popes
Nicholas III, who speaks from the hole, is the canto's named soul. He confesses with brevity: I vested was with the great mantle (the gran manto, the papal cope), son of the She-bear, so eager to advance the cubs — Ursine, the bear-coat of arms of the Orsini family. The Roman consorteria of the Orsini was one of the great noble families of the city, and Nicholas's pontificate (1277–1280) was widely judged to have been a season of unembarrassed nepotism: he installed his nephews and cousins in cardinalates and territorial commands across the Papal States. The confession is unornamented, which is itself a moral signal. Nicholas knows what he was.
The two predictions Nicholas makes are the canto's daring. Pope-souls in this hole sink as the next pope arrives. Nicholas has been toasting his feet longer than the next one will, because the next one is more wicked. Then what wantest thou of me asks Nicholas, having mistaken Dante's arrival for the arrival of the next pope; if who I am thou carest so much to know — that one shall come who I believed thou wast. The next one is Boniface VIII, still alive in 1300 when the canto's action is set, still alive (probably) when Dante was actually writing it. To predict a living pope's damnation through the voice of a dead pope already in Hell is one of the Inferno's most aggressive small literary procedures.
The pope after Boniface, in Nicholas's vision, will be worse still: a Pastor without law from the west, a new Jason (the Jewish high priest of the Maccabees who bought his office from Antiochus Epiphanes), as compliant to the king of France as the Maccabean Jason was to his Seleucid sovereign. The figure is Clement V (pope 1305–1314), the French archbishop of Bordeaux whose election was engineered by Philip IV of France, and who in 1309 transferred the papal court to Avignon — the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, which would last seventy years. Dante is anticipating, by years, an event that would become the dominant fact of fourteenth-century Catholicism. The canto's prophetic confidence is striking.
Dante's speech
The denunciation that follows is the longest piece of direct theological argument the pilgrim delivers in the entire Inferno. He invokes the call of Peter (nothing asked but Follow me); the election of Matthias by lot to replace Judas (nor Peter nor the rest asked of Matthias silver or gold); the simoniacal extortion of money by which Nicholas became valiant against Charles (Charles I of Anjou, whom Nicholas opposed); the Whore of Babylon of Revelation 17, identified plainly as the contemporary corrupt Church fornicating with kings; the golden calf of Exodus as the type of papal idolatry; and finally, in the canto's last tercet, the Donation of Constantine — Ah, Constantine! of how much ill was mother, / not thy conversion, but that marriage-dower / which the first wealthy Father took from thee. The Donation was the supposed grant by which Constantine, on his conversion, transferred temporal sovereignty over the western empire to the Pope. Dante believed the document genuine; he believed it the single most catastrophic event in Church history; and he believed the Pope's possession of temporal wealth was the original sin from which simony, nepotism, and the Avignon captivity all flowed. The last line of the canto is the Comedy's clearest piece of political theology.
Then Virgil takes the pilgrim up in his arms and carries him tenderly back up to the next bridge. The master is approving and protective. The canto suggests that anger of this kind — anger against the corrupt institutional Church — is a virtue.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening apostrophe.
O Simon Magus, O forlorn disciples, Ye who the things of God, which ought to be The brides of holiness, rapaciously For silver and for gold do prostitute, Now it behoves for you the trumpet sound, Because in this third Bolgia ye abide. (Inf. XIX.1–6)
The canto opens by addressing the damned themselves — a rhetorical move Dante uses only at moments of maximum moral urgency. The sacraments are brides; simony is prostitution. The metaphor governs everything that follows.
The baptistry digression.
To me less ample seemed they not, nor greater Than those that in my beautiful Saint John Are fashioned for the place of the baptizers, And one of which, not many years ago, I broke for some one, who was drowning in it; Be this a seal all men to undeceive. (Inf. XIX.16–21)
The autobiographical aside. Dante is on record, in the middle of his denunciation, about the time he broke a baptismal font to save a life.
The mistaken identity.
And he cried out: Dost thou stand there already, Dost thou stand there already, Boniface? By many years the record lied to me. (Inf. XIX.52–54)
The most aggressive single tercet of the canto. The dead pope mistakes the pilgrim for the still-living pope Boniface VIII, whom he expects to be planted on top of him at any moment. Boniface has been damned in advance, by the voice of his predecessor.
Nicholas's confession.
Know that I vested was with the great mantle; And truly was I son of the She-bear, So eager to advance the cubs, that wealth Above, and here myself, I pocketed. (Inf. XIX.69–72)
E veramente fui figliuol de l'orsa, / cupido sì per avanzar li orsatti. The Orsini bear-cubs, the nepotism, the wealth pocketed. Self-diagnosis in four lines.
The prophecy of Clement.
For after him shall come of fouler deed From tow'rds the west a Pastor without law, Such as befits to cover him and me. New Jason will he be, of whom we read In Maccabees; and as his king was pliant, So he who governs France shall be to this one. (Inf. XIX.82–87)
Clement V predicted years in advance, with the precise mechanism (compliance with the King of France) by which the Avignon captivity will be brought about. Few historical predictions in the poem are as exact.
The argument from Scripture.
I pray thee tell me now how great a treasure Our Lord demanded of Saint Peter first, Before he put the keys into his keeping? Truly he nothing asked but Follow me. Nor Peter nor the rest asked of Matthias Silver or gold, when he by lot was chosen Unto the place the guilty soul had lost. (Inf. XIX.90–96)
The patristic foundations. The papacy was founded on Follow me, not on a price. The argument is the standard reformist line of the medieval anti-simonists, delivered here by the layman.
The Whore of Babylon transferred.
The Evangelist you Pastors had in mind, When she who sitteth upon many waters To fornicate with kings by him was seen; The same who with the seven heads was born, And power and strength from the ten horns received, So long as virtue to her spouse was pleasing. (Inf. XIX.106–111)
Revelation 17 read forward into contemporary papal history. The seven heads are the seven sacraments; the ten horns are the Ten Commandments; the Pope's virtue to her spouse (Christ) was the condition of her power. The Apocalypse is being claimed as a piece of foretelling about thirteenth-century Rome.
The Donation.
Ah, Constantine! of how much ill was mother, Not thy conversion, but that marriage-dower Which the first wealthy Father took from thee! (Inf. XIX.115–117)
Ahi, Costantin, di quanto mal fu matre, / non la tua conversion, ma quella dote / che da te prese il primo ricco patre! The Comedy's clearest single sentence on the historical fusion of Church and State.
The carriage upward.
Therefore with both his arms he took me up, And when he had me all upon his breast, Remounted by the way where he descended. Nor did he tire to have me clasped to him. (Inf. XIX.124–127)
Virgil's tenderness. The master carries the pupil up the crag after the denunciation. The endorsement is physical.
What to watch for
Watch the next canto's inverted bodies. The simoniacs are upside-down with their feet in the air; the diviners and astrologers of canto XX will have their heads twisted backwards on their necks so that they walk facing where they have come from. The eighth circle is becoming a typology of bodily inversion as sin. The pattern is deliberate.
Watch the figure of Boniface. He will be referenced again — in canto XXVII, by the soul of Guido da Montefeltro, in one of the most damning posthumous portraits in the poem.
Watch the Avignon captivity. Clement's removal of the papacy to France in 1309 will be the unspoken political fact that hangs over the whole of Paradiso. The Comedy is a poem written from inside one of the major crises of medieval Catholic history.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.