If a Catholic layman criticizes a Pope, other critics of the Church say he is brave and open-minded; if a Pope were to criticize a layman, those critics would call the Pope repressive and judgmental.  Along these lines, less important is Dante Alighieri using his Divine Comedy to condemn Pope Boniface VIII or other Bishops of Rome to the depths of the Inferno, than how a modern Pope has appreciated and promoted Dante.

So far the only papal encyclical on Dante has been In praeclara summorum, promulgated in April of 1921 by Pope Benedict XV.  The occasion was the upcoming 600th anniversary of Dante’s death, and the Pope noted that the event would be marked by scholarly conferences and added, “Surely we cannot be absent from this universal consensus of good men,” since “the Church has special right to call Alighieri hers.”

This encyclical came fifty years after the First Vatican Council, and it followed up that Council’s teaching about the relationship between faith and reason.  Pope Benedict XV related that Dante was a keen reader of Saint Thomas Aquinas, from whom “he gained nearly all his philosophical and theological knowledge.”  Pope Benedict also pointed out Dante’s debts to the Bible and to the Church Fathers.

“Thus,” wrote the Pope, Dante “learned almost all that could be known in his time.”  Moreover, Dante was “nourished specially by Christian knowledge,” so that “it was on that field of religion that he drew when he set himself to treat in verse of things so vast and deep.”  Since Dante’s Divine Comedy and all his writings focus on the doctrines of the Catholic faith, said the Pope, “we think that these things may serve as teaching for men of our times.”

Along with reverence for Scripture and Tradition, Dante had “great reverence for the authority of the Catholic Church, the account in which he holds the power of the Roman Pontiff as the base of every law and institution of that Church.”  Still, Pope Benedict had to acknowledge Dante’s sometimes harsh criticisms.  “But, it will be said,” the Pope conceded, “he inveighs with terrible bitterness against the Supreme Pontiffs of his times.”  Of that fact there was no denying, and Dante’s bitterness towards Pope Boniface VIII derived from the role he played in Dante’s political exile from his beloved city of Florence.

With that situation in mind, Pope Benedict XV looked upon Dante’s invective with pastoral charity:  “One can feel for a man so beaten down by fortune, if with lacerated mind he breaks out sometimes into words of excessive blame.”  Also, “it cannot be denied that at that time there were matters on which the clergy might be reproved, and a mind as devoted to the Church as was that of Dante could not but feel disgust.”

            Yet, for all his revulsion at certain temporal machinations by Popes and others in the Church hierarchy, Dante never rejected the principle of papal primacy.  Even in his treatise on monarchy, often misread as a charter for world government or as a case for the superiority of the Holy Roman Emperor over the Pope, Dante reiterated the assertion of Pope Gelasius in the late fifth century, that in the end the authority of priests trumps the power of kings, since priests deal with immortal souls, while kings deal with mortal concerns.  “Excellent and wise principle indeed,” Pope Benedict agreed, “which, if it were observed today as it ought to be, would bring to States abundant fruits of civil prosperity.”

            Pope Benedict’s words now seem prophetic, for he wrote a few years after the end of the First World War and the outbreak of the Russian Revolution.  He seems to have foreseen the tyranny masquerading as populism and altruism that would mar Europe for decades to come.  He pointed out that Dante “was not a man to maintain, for the purpose of giving greater glory to country or pleasure to ruler, that the State may neglect justice and right, which he knew well to be the main foundation of civil nations.”

            With this encyclical Pope Benedict XV was putting on notice the secular powers of the day that the Church was aware of their trajectory that would seek to exclude faith from public discourse.  For him, Dante was proof of “the falseness of the assertion that obedience of mind and heart to God is a hindrance to genius.”  The example of Dante also shows “the harm done to the cause of learning and civilization by such a desire to banish all idea of religion from public instruction.”

The Pope then minced no words:  “Deplorable indeed is the system prevalent today of educating young students as if God did not exist and without the least reference to the supernatural.”  His hope was that scholarly celebrations of Dante on his 600th anniversary would counteract secular efforts to separate faith and reason.

            A year later, Pope Benedict XV was dead, and his successors, first Pope Pius XI and then Pope Pius XII, had to contend with secular states in Europe that had no regard for the rightly ordered society envisioned by Dante.  Those secular governments embraced various forms of state socialism and waged wars whilst promising to build Heaven on Earth, a paradise as potentially benevolent as one’s big brother.  Popes saw what Dante had seen, that man without the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob wanders in his own wasteland.

In April, 1999, Pope John Paul II mentioned Dante in a Letter to Artists, and in January, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI began an address to the Pontifical Council Cor Unum with an extended reference to Dante’s Paradiso and the importance of divine love.  It is unclear, though, whether we are seeing an emerging papal teaching about Dante.  In any case, we ought to follow the lead of Pope Benedict XV and meditate less on whom Dante damns and more on his love for the Church.

 

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B., is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.