Paradiso: Canto XXVII -- Denunciation of Papal Corruption

Dante may have predestined Boniface VIII to the 3rd bolgia of the 8th circle of hell, but nothing Pope Nicholas III foresaw could have prepared us for St. Peter's indignation as he announces that Boniface VIII is a usurper and that the seat stands vacant even with his presence in it, for he "has made a sewer of [St. Peter's] sepulchre, a flow/ of blood and stink at which the treacherous one/ who fell from [heaven] may chuckle there below" (24-6). Kschroeder may tell us more about these bad popes about whom St. Peter then speaks, but it is hard for the rest of us to imagine since we've lived for so long under the good popes of the 20th and 21st centuries. After denouncing greed, factionalism, papal warring against Christians, and simony, St. Peter legitimizes Dante's rhyme by commanding him to repeat it on earth without holding back what St. Peter has not held back, and we get a sense that a lot of those people floundering in hell are there because of bad shepherding by their spiritual leaders. Each person, of course, is, as Aristotle teaches, responsible for his or her own vice, and woe be unto those who corrupt others or in their capacity allow others to be corrupted through them; likewise, those who are good, as St. Adalbert of Prague can attest, might find themselves outcast by believer and pagan alike.



As earth is the feeder ground for heaven and hell, it makes sense that St. Peter would be so upset, which is a point we've explored before now, but St. Peter has a perspective on earth that we haven't yet seen, and it takes Beatrice to explain it to us that time's running out for humankind to reconcile itself with God. Dante glances this aspect of time in the instant it takes him to look down on Earth and see it as a "little threshing floor" (85) blotted out by the sun. When he returns his eyes to Beatrice, he discovers that they have entered the final sphere, the Primum Mobile, where she explains the essence of time as derived from heaven's unfactored (because it is the unity of all things) motion so that those souls that emanate from it are pulled back into it as ripples that move inward are displaced by those that follow, and the intervals between these tugs, not in space, but in states of being, constitute the time we perceive as a mariner does a tide.

S.