The Catholic Church has delineated various pious and sinful actions that humans are capable of; it would logically follow that in Hell, these sins would be punished in respectfully distinct manners. However, how would one qualify which sin is the most egregious, and how would one decide which punishment would fit the crime? In The Inferno, Dante seeks to answer these questions in a grand categorization of religious sins, beginning with those of lack of baptism and ending with those of treachery. However, there is a particular emphasis put on the representation of religious figures in the story. Rather than revering the clergy, Dante uses their sins to critique the Catholic Church. While there is a certain level of anonymity when describing
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The reason Boniface is placed in the eighth circle is that many of his contemporaries thought he was guilty of simony, despite a lack of hard proof. One of the sins that Boniface committed was that he took “the beautiful Lady by deceit” (XIX.52). According to the endnotes, the “Lady” is how people in Dante’s time referred to the Church. Boniface was accused of causing the abdication of the previous pope, Pope Celestine V and ascending to the papacy through simony. Pope Celestine is mentioned in the inferno in the third canto, when Dante is describing Limbo. He abdicated as pope only five months in, because of political pressure in the name of Boniface. However, he was placed in Limbo because “The Great Refusal (was) impelled/by cowardice” (III.50-51). In the same way that the clergy of the fourth circle were led astray because of their irrational avarice, Pope Celestine sinned because of his emotion-driven cowardice. There is a sharp juxtaposition between Celestine’s punishment in Limbo (like Virgil’s, of longing) with Boniface’s preordained fiery suffering—due to the rationality scale on which the two of them sinned considerably differently. Celestine’s irrational cowardice contrasts with Boniface’s deliberate simony. After Boniface, the next sinner was going to be Pope Clement V, the “lawless shepherd of the West…this one/Will get soft treatment from the King of France” (XIX.76,81-82). Clement V, the pope who moved the papacy to France and who was under the control of Philip IV, is interestingly looked down upon by Nicholas as being “lawless,” despite the fact that the both of them suffer the same fate because of the same sin. This judgement could be referring back to the concept of the inability of damned souls to repent, acknowledging others’ sins rather than their
The reason Boniface is placed in the eighth circle is that many of his contemporaries thought he was guilty of simony, despite a lack of hard proof. One of the sins that Boniface committed was that he took “the beautiful Lady by deceit” (XIX.52). According to the endnotes, the “Lady” is how people in Dante’s time referred to the Church. Boniface was accused of causing the abdication of the previous pope, Pope Celestine V and ascending to the papacy through simony. Pope Celestine is mentioned in the inferno in the third canto, when Dante is describing Limbo. He abdicated as pope only five months in, because of political pressure in the name of Boniface. However, he was placed in Limbo because “The Great Refusal (was) impelled/by cowardice” (III.50-51). In the same way that the clergy of the fourth circle were led astray because of their irrational avarice, Pope Celestine sinned because of his emotion-driven cowardice. There is a sharp juxtaposition between Celestine’s punishment in Limbo (like Virgil’s, of longing) with Boniface’s preordained fiery suffering—due to the rationality scale on which the two of them sinned considerably differently. Celestine’s irrational cowardice contrasts with Boniface’s deliberate simony. After Boniface, the next sinner was going to be Pope Clement V, the “lawless shepherd of the West…this one/Will get soft treatment from the King of France” (XIX.76,81-82). Clement V, the pope who moved the papacy to France and who was under the control of Philip IV, is interestingly looked down upon by Nicholas as being “lawless,” despite the fact that the both of them suffer the same fate because of the same sin. This judgement could be referring back to the concept of the inability of damned souls to repent, acknowledging others’ sins rather than their