The Divine Comedy: Week 14, Money, Power and the Church

What makes the Divine Comedy hard for modern readers are all the literary, historical and political references and allusions. You really do need an annotated copy of the Comedy to keep track of it all, all the references to myth, church history, and Florentine politics.

While we can get lost in the maze of all Dante's references, his purpose is a decidedly modern and practical one. On page after page of the Comedy, Dante is calling out corruption in both the church and the state.

One example comes right at the start of Canto XIX where Dante uses Simon Magnus from the book of Acts as a model for all the corrupt popes in the Catholic church:

O Simon Magus! O scum that followed him!
Those things of God that rightly should be wed
to holiness, you, rapacious creatures,

for the price of gold and silver, prostitute.

Simon Magnus, you'll recall from Acts 8, attempts to buy the power of the Holy Spirit. Dante uses Simon Magnus as an image of how money corrupted the spirituality of the church.

Dante goes on in Canto XIX to trace the "Simon Magus problem" all the way back to the first Christian emperor, Constantine:

O Constantine, what evil did you sire,
not by your conversion, but by the dower
that the first wealthy Father [the pope] got from you!

By wedding Imperial power to the church, the popes inherited political influence and wealth, and these became dark, corrupting forces.

Many of us became aware of the "Constantinian heresy" from the works of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, that the church began a dark turn when Christianity became married to the Empire. Dante made that same observation in 1320.

And it's all still such a huge, depressing problem. The church continues to struggle with, in small and large ways, the corrupting influences of money and power.

O Simon Magus! O scum that followed him!