DANTE AND THE FRANCISCANS

THE MEDIEVALFRANCISCANS

GENERAL EDITOR

Steven J. McMichaelUniversity of St. Thomas

VOLUME 3

DANTE AND THEFRANCISCANS

EDITED BY

SANTA CASCIANI

LEIDEN BOSTON2006

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................... viiNotes on Contributors .............................................................. ixIntroduction ................................................................................ 1

Santa Casciani

Dante, Peter John Olivi, and the Franciscan Apocalypse ...... 9V.S. Benfell III

Clarissan Spirituality and Dante ................................................ 51Tonia Bernardi Triggiano

Bernardino: Reader of Dante .................................................... 85Santa Casciani

What Dante Learned from St Francis ...................................... 113William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman

A Franciscan explanation of Dantes cinquecento diece e cinque ........ 141Elvira Giosi

Dantes Franciscanism ................................................................ 171Giuseppe Mazzotta

The Life of the World to Come: The Franciscan Character of Paradiso .............................................................................. 199Amanda D. Quantz

The Cross as te in The Canticle of Creatures, Dantes Virgin Mother, and Chaucers Invocation to Mary .... 229Sister Lucia Treanor

Pax et bonum: Dantes Depiction of Francis of Assisi in Paradiso 11 .......................................................................... 289Alessandro Vettori

Vestiges and Communities: Franciscan Traces in Dantes New Life .................................................................................. 307Brenda Wirkus

Index .......................................................................................... 345

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to the many individuals whohave supported me in this project and who have reviewed essays forthe volume. I owe much to Sister Ingrid Peterson of the Sisters ofSaint Francis (Franciscan Federation), to Christopher Kleinhenz(University of Wisconsin), to Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale University),to Alessandro Vettori (Rutgers University), to David Burr (ProfessorEmeritus of Virginia Tech), and to Ronald B. Herzman (StateUniversity of New York, Geneseo) for reading and giving their exper-tise on Dante and the Franciscans respectively. I also wish to thankboth the Franciscan Institute at Saint Bonaventure University andthe Franciscan Federation for hosting through the last several yearssessions on Dante and his relationship to the Franciscans. Specialthanks go to Steven J. McMichael (University of Saint Thomas),General Editor of The Medieval Franciscan Movement series for havingtrusted me to edit this volume. My gratitude also goes to my col-leagues Brenda Wirkus (Philosophy Department) and Serena Scaiola-Ziska (Classical and Modern Languages and Cultures), and to mywork-study students, Scott Orr and Nina Dambrosio, for their helpin the proof-reading of the essays. I must also thank Mary BethBrooks and Giuseppina Mileti who both work for the Bishop AnthonyM. Pilla Program in Italian American Studiesthe Program I directfor taking on some of my administrative duties so that I could nishthis volume. I must also express my deepest gratitude to my homeinstitution, John Carroll University, the Jesuit University in Cleveland,for granting me a Grauel Faculty Fellowship Leave in fall 2003 tobegin to assemble the work presented in this volume. I wish also tothank Julian Deahl and Marcella Mulder of Brill for accepting thisvolume. My greatest debt I owe to the authors for the quality oftheir work and for bearing patiently my requests for revisions andeditorial changes.

Santa CascianiJohn Carroll University, The Jesuit University in ClevelandCleveland, Ohio

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

V.S. Benfell III is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature atBrigham Young University. He has published articles on Dante,Renaissance epic, and Petrarchism. His current research interestsconcern the history of biblical interpretation and its relation to poetry.He is currently completing a book-length study on Dantes use ofthe Bible.

Tonia Bernardi Triggiano is an Assistant Visiting Professor of Italian atDominican University in River Forest, Illinois. She teaches in a vari-ety of Italian studies including language, linguistics, culture, andmedieval literature. Her research revolves around Dantes Paradisoand the poetry of medieval Franciscan women especially as it appearsin primary sources. She is currently working on a compilation andtranscription of the written works of Battista da Montefeltro-Malatesta.

Santa Casciani is an Associate Professor of Italian at John CarrollUniversity, The Jesuit University in Cleveland, where she also directsthe Bishop Anthony M. Pilla Program in Italian American Studiesand the John Carroll University at Vatican City Study AbroadProgram. She has published articles on Italian and Italian Americanliterature, and pedagogy, including also works on authors such asDante, Michelangelo and Ruzante. She has co-edited a collection ofessays, Word, Image, Number: Communications in the Middle Ages (withJohn Contreni) and co-translated and co-edited The Fiore (and Dettodamore): A Late 13th-century Italian Translation of the Roman de la Rose (withChristopher Kleinhenz). She teaches a number of courses related toFranciscan spirituality and literature.

William R. Cook is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the StateUniversity of New York, Geneseo. He has published a brief biogra-phy of Saint Francis (Liturgical Press, 1989) as well as two books onearly Franciscan art, most recently Images of St. Francis of Assisi (LeoS. Olschki, 1999). He has also edited The Art of the Franciscan Orderin Italy (The Medieval Franciscans).

x notes on contributors

Elvira Giosi is Visiting Assistant Professor at Saint Louis Universityand has also held an academic position at Stony Brook Universitywhere she taught both language and literature courses. Her scholarlyinterests focus on medieval Italian literature and she has publishedon a variety of Italian authors. Her Ph.D. dissertation addressesBeatrices Prophesy in Purgatorio 33.

Ronal Herzman is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Englishat the College at Geneseo. His publications include The Medieval WorldView (with William Cook) and The Apocalyptic Imagination in MedievalLiterature (with Richard Emmerson). His work on Francis includes avideo/audio course which he team teaches with William Cook in theTeaching Companys Great Courses series.

Giuseppe Mazzotta is Sterling Professor in the Humanities for Italianat Yale University, where he serves as Chairman of the Departmentof Italian Studies. He is the current President of the Dante Societyof America. A scholar of rare distinction, Professor Mazzotta is theauthor of several ground-breaking studies dealing with the tangle ofliterature, politics, theology and philosophy in dierent periods andauthors of Italian literature. His work on Dante includes books thatare widely acknowledged as classics in the eld: Dante, Poet of theDesert: History and allegory in the Divine Comedy and Dantes Vision and theCircle of Knowledge. He has also edited Critical Essays on Dante and theNorton Critical edition of Inferno.

Amanda Quantz is Assistant Professor of the History of World Christianityat Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. Her research interestsspan the Eastern and Western branches of the Christian tradition.She teaches and writes about topics that highlight the intersectionbetween church history and visual art, and has a particular interestin Franciscan intellectual history.

Sister Lucia Treanor, F. S. E., a Franciscan Sister of the Eucharist, isan Aliate Professor in the Writing Department of Grand ValleyState University in Allendale, Michigan, where she also teachesmedieval and early modern European literature. She has lectured onpalindromic structure at Georgetown University, Columbia Universityand the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, andis currently writing a book about it.

notes on contributors xi

Alessandro Vettori teaches in the Department of Italian at RutgersUniversity in New Jersey. He published a book on Francis and Iacoponeda Todi and is currently working on a book-length project on theconcept of exile in Dantes Divine Comedy. He has also publishedarticles on novels and plays that reproduce the biblical texts incontemporary Italian literature.

Brenda Wirkus is the Don Shula Professor of Philosophy at John CarrollUniversity in Cleveland, Ohio, where she has also served as chairpersonof that department and as director of both the Center for Teachingand Learning and the Program in Applied Ethics. Her publicationsfocus on issues in social philosophy, ethics, and feminist theory; themost recent investigates the ontological status of communities. Herwork continues to center on questions of individuation and communitythroughout the history of philosophy.

INTRODUCTION

Santa Casciani

The joy of editing this volume comes from my long interest in under-standing Dantes Divine Comedy in relation to the Franciscan intellectualtradition, an interest which began when I was a Ph.D. student atthe University of Wisconsin-Madison. My interest in understandingthe Franciscan charism dates back to my childhood.

I was born in a small town near LAquila and immigrated withmy parents to Rochester, New York in 1969. As a young child, grow-ing up and living in a Franciscan convent/boarding school in LAquilaoperated by the Franciscan Sisters of Mercy, I would ask myself whyso many Franciscan convents and why so many friars lived in LAquila.Moreover, why would they wear sandals during our bitter cold win-ters? Were they not cold like the rest of us? How could they standto wear sandals in the winters? I never understood until I was olderthat bare feet was and is part of the humility that Saint Francisinstilled in his friars. Still today, I remember all those Sunday after-noons away from the enclosed walls of the all-girl convent where Iwas studying away from home, only able to leave to attend publicschool in LAquila. Every Sunday with my cousins Luigia and StefaniaI would go to the Convent of Saint Bernardino in LAquila whereFriar Casimiro, with a smile on his face, would always welcome us tothe recreation room where we would play ping-pong and eat cookies.These memories would accompany me for years to come in Americaduring the days when I would miss my life in Italy. Friar Casimirossmile is still embedded in my mind today along with the smell ofthe cookies he gave us for our afternoon snack. For years I wouldwonder what it was about the Franciscan Order that made me feelat peace and at home. Perhaps it was the sense of charity thatemanated from Friar Casimiros smile, his sense of humility thatfreed him from any kind of discrimination, his sense of equalitywhich removed from me that sense of inferiority I felt growing upin a country that showed discrimination among classes. (These werethe sixties before Italy moved towards social democracy.)

2 santa casciani

When it came time to choose a dissertation topic at the Universityof Wisconsin-Madison, I knew that I really wanted to work on theFranciscans of LAquila because I wanted to reconnect my work withmy own identity. I wanted to understand why all of the doors ofthe lower part of the city had a sun depicted on them with 12 raysand why the people of LAquila would call it the Saint Bernardinossun. What did the image of the sun have to do with Franciscan spir-ituality? And how did it relate to Dantes idea of the Pentecostalgift? I discovered an interesting relationship between Dante andBernardino, and I address it in my own essay in this volume.

However, this collection of essays oers much more than the rela-tionship between Dante and Bernardino. It presents a Franciscanreading of the Divine Comedy. In the last decade there has been agrowing interest in the study of the history of the Franciscan move-ment in relation to Dante Alighieri. However, this study is only thesecond volume dedicated to Dante and the Franciscans.1 Nine of theten essays presented here are a clear sign that Dantes Comedy andhis Vita Nuova were very much inuenced by Franciscan spirituality.The tenth essay addresses the inuence that Dantes Comedy had onthe preaching of the Franciscan Order. The contributions to the vol-ume are from scholars of literature, philosophy, theology and his-tory and represent a much needed analysis of Franciscan inuenceon Dantes literary production, and of the inuence that Dante hadon the preaching of Bernardino of Siena. The result is, I believe, asignicant contribution to the study of how Dante understood andemployed Franciscan sources in his literary production and howBernardino of Siena integrate Dantes work into his preaching.

V.S. Benfell III examines Dantes use of the nal book of the Biblein The Divine Comedy and how that usage may have been inuencedby Franciscan understandings of the Apocalypse, especially as inter-preted by Olivi. In analyzing Dantes understanding of the Apocalypseand how it compares to the Franciscan apocalypse, Benfell demon-strates how Dante and Olivi shared many of the same concernsregarding church corruption, and that Dante found in the Franciscanapocalypse a vocabulary and a set of images useful for his articula-tion of how history was ordered. The essay addresses how the SpiritualFranciscans sought to understand why the purity of their order was

1 See Nick Havely, Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the Commedia(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

introduction 3

being undermined, evenin their viewagrantly disregarded, andso many turned to the biblical book that for them contained the keyto understanding history: the Apocalypseespecially as interpretedby Joachim of Fiore. They began to see the present corruption asplaying a part in the providential ordering of history; God wouldsoon intervene in order to issue a new age, a period of history inwhich the pure Franciscans would play a key role. Peter John Oliviwas a leading exponent of the spiritualist viewpoint (though far frombeing the movements most radical member), and he wrote anextremely important commentary on the Apocalypse. Benfall arguesthat although Dante never mentions Olivi by name, we know thathe taught in Florence at Santa Croce in the late 1280s and that thesimilarities between Dantes own use of the Apocalypse and Olivishas led to speculation that Dante must have known Olivis work oreven Olivi himself, or, at worst, Olivis follower at Santa Croce,Ubertino of Casale, a gure Dante does mention in Paradiso 12.12426. Ultimately, though, the dierences between their apocalyp-tic visions are as noteworthy as the similarities; Dante takes whatsuits him from the Spiritual Franciscans, but the vision of historythat he expounds in the Comedy is very much his own.

Tonia Bernardi Triggiano revisits the role that Piccarda Donatiplays in Dantes Comedy. Originally interpreted as a symbol of incon-stancy, Piccarda, according to Triggiano, ought to more ttingly beappreciated as the rst in a long line of heavenly interlocutors, oneof many to aord the pilgrim intellectual passage toward the divinevision of God. The reader of the Commedia becomes acquainted withPiccarda in Paradiso 3. There, in the sphere of the moon, the poetassigns Piccarda a pivotal role whereby she not only recalls a specicrelationship to the poets own contemporary Florentine history but more importantly, serves to introduce the prima materia of thecanticlethe souls enjoyment of the beatic vision in the afterlifeas reward for ones proper use of free will during the earthly life. Theeconomy of the Paradiso depends upon a process of question andanswer, and Piccarda is instrumental in this rst phase of the pilgrimseducational program. Piccarda claries both her own history in herthwarted attempt for sisterhood, and she addresses larger theologicaltruths. Like other gures in the Commedia, Piccarda is emblematic.She personies a specic category of religious women and herrepresentation of the order of St. Clare speaks primarily of integra-tion in the context of a variety of relationships: she, in relation to

4 santa casciani

her place among the blessed, and in relation to her vocation. Dantesrecreation of his kinswoman as a virgin sister who speaks to thetenets of Clarissan spirituality places her into the order of SaintClare, in this way correcting the violence done to her by her brother,Corso. Dante demonstrates that although Corso was successful in hisplan to reroute his sisters physical promise to the cloister, he hadno power in diverting her spiritual and intellectual attachment. Indeed,the allegory of Paradiso 3 depends upon the notion of promises andthe will required in preserving them.

My essay, Bernardino: Reader of Dante, is the only essay ded-icated to Dantes reception in the Franciscan Order. In addressingDantes inuence on the Franciscan Order of fteenth-century Italyand applying theories of readership, which explicate the complexrelationship among authorship, interpretation, and audience, I analyzeBernardino of Sienas preaching. In addressing the faithful, some ofBernardinos sermons use Dantes idealized perspective on Christianityideals which for Dante emerge from his understanding of Franciscanspirituality. Specically, for Bernardino, Dante becomes the voice ofmorality. In Sermon 23, preached in Piazza del Campo in 1427,the Saint recalls the episode of Guido of Montefeltro who in Inferno 27is punished for betraying the ideals of Francis. This canto of TheComedy was particularly important to Bernardino, for he employed itto juxtapose the contemporary world of factions in Siena to the trueFranciscan piety and to show the people of Siena the consequencesof factionalism. For Bernardino, the Comedy recalls Francis idea thatintellectual pursuits should aim toward a living faith and not byrhetorical speculation. In fact, Francis advocated a language obedi-ent to the Word of God and not one that would fall into sophisticrhetoric. In the essay I conclude that Bernardino, using Dantes Inferno27, shows how Dante in this particular canto ironically reveals hisintention to create a just world at peace both socially and spiritually.

William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman, as they attempt toaddress the question of what Dante learned from St. Francis, beginwith a reection on the lives of Francis and Dante, lives which showboth striking parallels and unexpected dierences. The essay tells thestory of Francis life by emphasizing the way in which quintessen-tial Franciscan virtues emerged as Francis came face to face withhis own vocation. It then shows how these virtues were necessary toDante as he came face to face with his own exile. The essay thenanalyzes key Franciscan moments in the Divine Comedy by placing

introduction 5

them in the larger context of what Dante learned from Francis. Thusthe essay attempts to show how a number of important ways oflooking at the Commedia, including Dante as critic of church wealth,as a crusader, as a peacemaker, and even as a cosmic poet, owean enormous debt to Francis.

In her essay Elvira Giosi addresses the problematic phrase of cinque-cento diece e cinque (ve hundred and Ten and Five) uttered by Beatricein Purgatorio 33. In her analysis, she reinterprets the accepted idea ofthis phrase, which critics have associated with a numerical transpositionof the Latin Letters DXV to DUX and which is believed to referto an Emperor who, according to Dante, would bring an end to thecorruption and the political disorder of his times. Specically, inexplicating this mysterious number, Giosi considers the inuences ofFranciscan Joachimite mysticism, and those of Jewish mysticism onDantes poetic creation of the DXV. Namely, she shows how theFlorentine poet uses the Jewish numerology along with the latemedieval eschatologyas found in the works of Spiritual Franciscanssuch as Peter Olivi, Ubertino of Casale and Alexander of Bremain order to create a numerical symbol of Charity, Justice and Rectitude.Furthermore, in analyzing how the cinquecento diece e cinque can beconnected to the Spiritual Franciscans expectations of a new era, sheconcludes that Dante in the DXV meant to identify Saint Francis asthe messianic avenger in his Comedy.

Giuseppe Mazzotta, in dening the nature of creative energy foundin the Franciscan movement, analyzes the multiple strain of theFranciscan tradition in Dantes Comedy. He rst examines how Danteresponded to medieval Franciscanism by interpreting the meaningof Guido of Montefeltro in Inferno 27. He notes that in this particularcharacter, Dante wishes to raise issues of papal power (and politicaltheology), and most importantly trace the boundaries of the thirteenth-century debate between Franciscan theologians and secular masters.Specically, the canto evokes the key questions of the thirteenth-century debate on the liberal arts and the Franciscan attack againstlogic and speculative grammar. He then turns to the cantos in whichDante refers to the Heaven of the Sun (Paradiso 1013) and demon-strates how Dante explores further the sense of the Franciscan intel-lectual traditions, connecting the Divine Comedys concern with giftsto the Franciscan theology of spiritual gifts.

In her essay Amanda D. Quantz shows how Dante employs aFranciscan heuristic lens throughout the Divine Comedy. It is a perspective

6 santa casciani

that underpins the framework for his understanding of sin, purga-tion and salvation. Unlike other scholastic authors, such as Anselmand Aquinas, Dante communicates clearly that it is not wisdom, obe-dience or virtuosity that determines ones capacity to live out theReign of God, but rather, the love that moves the sun and otherstars. Furthermore, she explores how for Dante, life is a trainingground for perfect beatitude, while the vita apostolica of the Franciscanvariety is the lifestyle that most closely resembles the life lived byLove incarnate. God provides grace in the form of sustenance, con-solation and companionship throughout the journey, in order to aordthe individual the greatest possible opportunity for the success thatthe saints enjoy to various degrees. According to Dante, our task onearth is to cooperate with the grace that is continually oered, sothat we might live out our potential as creatures made in the imageand likeness of God who is love. Indeed, all three books of the DivineComedy make this point for the reader, whether by admonition orexample.

Sister Lucia Treanor addresses the importance of the Greek tauin Hebrew history (Ezk. 9.4), the signicance of which Pope InnocentIII recounted at the Fourth Lateran Council, and interprets it as asign of renewal in the Church. Specically, the Pope honored it asthe form of the cross, and elevated this allegorical image to theposition of sacramental, for the letter t, in sound and analogic resem-blance, evoked the sacred. Although there is no historical proof thatthe Franciscans of the thirteenth century knew the pronouncementsof the Council, we know for sure that from the very beginning ofthe Order of Friars Minor, and certainly after the stigmatization ofFrancis, the cross was central to the spirituality of every Franciscan.The essay identies Francis of Assisis The Canticle of Creaturesas a palindromic structure that was imitated and extended by Danteand Chaucer. It considers the palindrome from the formal point ofview of semiotics, and classies several examples from major worksof the classical and medieval periods, locating The Canticle withinthe spectrum of the classication. Although this poem has been stud-ied in its outer beauty, Treanor shows that scholars need to con-sider its inner graphic design in order to appreciate fully its aporeticcharacteristic.

Alessandro Vettori, focusing on the duplicity and specularity ofParadiso 11, demonstrates how the gures of speech and the binaryquality of this canto aim at communicating a sense of peace and

introduction 7

reconciliation, already present thematically in this canto. He arguesthat the sense of peace, which in De Monarchia Dante regards as auniversal human goal, is featured within the innermost poetic foldsof Paradiso 11 as a representative characteristic of Franciscanism atits inceptive steps. He addresses the double structure of Paradiso 11and 12 (a unique case of twin cantos in the Divine Comedy), whichare dedicated to the two Mendicant Orders, one to Francis and oneto Dominic. Furthermore, he analyzes the sense of unity created bythe intertwining of the accounts: Franciss life is told by ThomasAquinas, a Dominican; Dominics life is narrated by Bonaventure ofBagnoregio, a Franciscan. He demonstrates that the frequent use ofchiasmus and other binary rhetorical structures in the two cantosbear a direct or indirect message of reconciliation and harmony asmain qualities of Franciscanism. In emphasizing poverty and humil-ity, Dante portrays Francis as the reformer of the Church fromwithin. The scene of his nude conversion on Piazza San Runo, hismystical marriage to Lady Poverty, the foundation of the Order, andthe nal gift of the stigmata are the scattered facts that determineDantes representation of the Poverelloall within an aura of peace-fulness and reconciliation.

Brenda Wirkus examines Dantes Vita Nuova with the intent ofuncovering its philosophical foundations, specically those derivedfrom the Franciscan tradition. More specically still, she focuses ontwo Franciscan themes: nding traces of God in the world and see-ing human relationships as essentially communal. In developing therst theme, she explores Dantes use of the character Beatrice asemblematic of truth and beauty and, thus, of the love of God. Thedistance that separated Dante from Beatrice, Wirkus argues, madeit possible for him to view her as a medium which reveals the good-ness of God rather than as a concrete, particular individual makingmoral demands upon him. In this way, Dantes The New Life appearsas a call to a truer life, one which seeks the higher through thelower. And that call clearly reects the theme of Saint BonaventuresItinerarium Mentis in Deum: that we can nd the shadows and vestigesof God in the sensible world, in the movement, order, and beautyof things. In the second part of her essay, she argues that La VitaNuova is not simply an individual chronicle of an individuals rela-tionship with a woman he barely knows; in fact its structure revealsmuch more. Friendsrelatives and neighborswere an indispens-able part of the medieval Italian city. The male protagonist of La

8 santa casciani

Vita Nuova refers frequently to his friends and companions. Furthermore,he addresses many of his poems to the reader as a peer and poten-tial friend, to the courteous man and to women with under-standing of love. Dantes work, according to Wirkus, is self-consciouslyaware of the relationship between a poet and his public. At the sametime this work is a chronicle of a young poet attempting to articu-late his unique vision and discover his own poetic voice. His jour-ney, she concludes, can thus also be characterized as a process ofindividuation from his many communities, including the communityof troubadour poets and his rst friend Guido Cavalcanti. Readersthus can observe both the poet emerging from those many communitiesand the man returning, transformed, to those communities, echoingclearly a Franciscan sensibility and perspective.

The most remarkable aspect of this book is the interrelationshipbetween Dante and the Franciscan intellectual tradition. All essayscontribute to a wider understanding of this relationship and showhow all disciplines can come together to shed light on how theFranciscan intellectual component informs so much of Dantes writing.

1 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1967), 7.

2 Norman Cohn and others have argued that this sense of crisis is primarily whatmotivates apocalyptic movements. See Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium: RevolutionaryMillenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, rev. ed. (London: Temple Smith,1970). I nd Bernard McGinns notion, howeverthat those who turn to apocalypticthought do so in order to make sense of the presentmore persuasive. See, for exam-ple, his introduction to Apocalyptic Spirituality (Mahway, NJ: Paulist Press, 1979), 8:The apocalyptic mentality is a particular form of pre-understanding rather than amere way of responding. More sensitive to change than the mass of their fellows,apocalypticists are more in need of a religious structure within which to absorb andgive meaning to the anxieties that always accompany existence and change.

DANTE, PETER JOHN OLIVI, AND THE FRANCISCAN APOCALYPSE

V.S. Benfell III

Dantes poem begins, as do all of our journeys, in the middle ofthings, and yet it is preoccupied with apocalypse, that is, with theend time. As Frank Kermode has noted, this divided attention toboth present and future proves typical of western literature, sincehuman beings need ctive concords with origins and ends, such asgive meaning to lives and to poems. Thus, as we situate our ownlives within a larger narrative that projects forward to a time of clo-sure, we do so in order to make sense of our lives now, since theEnd [we] imagine will reect [our] irreducibly intermediary preoc-cupations.1 It is not surprising, therefore, that Apocalypticism ourishesduring periods of transition and crisis, partly because these timesoften strike those living through them as heading toward a historicalclimax, but predominantly because it is through the imposition ofan end that individuals can come to an understanding and acceptanceof their present.2 That is, apocalypse oers a way of perceiving theworld to those seeking order and purpose.

This apocalyptic hermeneutic proves to be characteristic both ofDantes poem and of the writings of a group of Franciscans whowere convinced that the mainstream of their order had betrayed theideals of its founder. This faction of rigorists, whom we normally

10 v.s. benfell iii

refer to as Spiritual Franciscans,3 came under persecution for theirvocal and determined resistance to what they saw as the increasingmaterialism of their order. They turned to the Apocalypse as a wayof understanding the growing laxity of other Franciscans and theimportance of their own adherence to the ideal of evangelical povertyin the face of opposition. The most inuential Spiritual Franciscanexegete of the Bibles nal book was Peter John Olivi, whose viewsof the end time (and hence of the moment in which he wrote) provedso dangerously inuential that they were condemned posthumouslyby Pope John XXII in 1326. There is evidence that Dante knew ofand to some degree sympathized with the Spirituals, and it alsoseems clear that the Spirituals apocalyptic views had some inuenceover Dante. In this essay, I will explore both Dantes use of the nalbook of the Bible and how that usage may have been inuenced byFranciscan understandings of the Apocalypse. First, though, we mustreview the evidence of Dantes knowledge of and sympathy for PeterJohn Olivi and the Spirituals.

The Spiritual Franciscans and Dante

Even before Saint Francis died in 1226, the tensions that would leadto the split in the Franciscan order and the rise of a group of Spiritualswere already visible. Francis had envisioned a group of minor friarswho would be characterized by their embrace of poverty and extremehumility. As the order grew, however, the diculties of translatingthat ideal into an institutional context became increasingly apparent.4

3 David Burr writes in his recent history of the movement, The Spiritual Franciscans:From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis (University Park: PennsylvaniaState University Press, 2001), that prior to 1320, the word spiritual was not usedfrequently in reference to this faction of the order; in the early fourteenth century,for example, they were more often referred to by the name of their leader at thetime, Ubertino da Casale, as Ubertino and his associates from the province ofProvence or simply Ubertino and his associates (viii). As we will see, this is howDante refers to the faction as well. For the sake of convenience, however, I willuse the slightly anachronistic designation of Spiritual Franciscans or Spiritualsto refer to Olivi, Ubertino, and their associates throughout this essay.

4 See David Burr, The Franciscan Dilemma, in The Spiritual Franciscans, 110.Much of my summary of the Spirituals derives from this and other works of Burr,as well as the work of Raoul Manselli. See, in particular, Da Gioacchino da Fiore aCristoforo Cololmbo: Studi sul Francescanesimo spirituale, sullecclesiologia e sullescatologismo bas-somedievali (Rome: Istituto storico Italiano per il medio evo, 1997). An earlier history

dante, peter john olivi, & the franciscan apocalypse 11

Francis eventually resigned from the leadership of the order in late1220, though he continued to inuence its direction by writing theorders rule and by dictating his Testament, which he intended toserve as a guide to the rule, near the time of his death. But withina few years, the order had become a powerful and inuential movementwithin the Church, and its members were wanted for prominentecclesiastical positions, government service, and teachers of theology,all of which seemed, to many, to contradict the ideals of the ordersfounder.5

There is little evidence of any coordinated Spiritualist movementprior to 1274. At that time, more public controversies began to sur-face within the order that paved the way for the later conict. Perhapsthe most important surrounded the question of the Franciscan vowof poverty and usus pauper, and it revolved around the gure of Petrus Iohannis Olivi, a friar from the south of France.6 As the ordergrew, it became apparent to most friars that Franciss early ideal ofabsolute poverty would not work for a prominent order involved inthe government of the Church. Early on, therefore, a compromisewas reached in the papal bull Quo elongati, issued by Pope GregoryIX on September 28, 1230, in which Gregory made the importantdistinction between use and ownership.7 The friars could not actu-ally own property, which was clearly prohibited by the vow that thefriars made upon joining the order, but they needed to have thenecessities of life; the bull allowed the Franciscans use of these thingsas long as they were owned by someone else, such as the pope orthe cardinal protector of the order. Some forty years later or so, acontroversy arose regarding the denition of use. Some friars, suchas Olivi, felt that the Franciscan vow, while it allowed for use even

of the movement is Decima L. Douie, The Nature and the Eect of the Heresy of theFraticelli (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1932).

5 In terms of ecclesiastical positions, for example, Burr notes that the rstFranciscan cardinal dates from 1273; the rst inquisitors from the 1250s; the rstbishops, from even earlier (348, n. 11). The rst Franciscan pope was NicholasIV ( Jerome of Ascoli), elected in 1288. For a standard account of the history ofthe Franciscan order, see John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order: From ItsOrigins to the Year 1517 (1968. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1988).

6 This seems to be the correct form of Olivis name, which means Peter [son]of John Olivi, with Iohannis serving as a patronymic. I follow, however, the stan-dard English form of his name: Peter John Olivi. The standard biography of Oliviis David Burr, The Persecution of Peter Olivi, Transactions of the American PhilosophicalSociety, vol. 66, part 5 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976).

7 Moorman, History, 90; Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 15.

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while it prohibited ownership, also demanded poor use, usus pauper.This distinction was important to Olivi, because he saw that withoutit, the practice of use without ownership was open to widespreadabuse, as many friars gravitated toward usus dives, or rich use.

Although Olivis views concerning what constituted poor use wereactually fairly moderate, many of the leaders of the order objectedto his statement of his position, and Olivi found himself on the neg-ative end of a lengthy controversy. In 1283, he was ocially censuredby a commission of seven Paris scholars, who also dismissed himfrom his teaching post and conscated his writings. In 1287, however,Olivi was evidently rehabilitated, as he was given a new teachingpost as a lector in the Florentine Franciscan school of Santa Croce.He returned to Provence in 1289 and seems to have remained freefrom censure and persecution until his death in 1298. Nevertheless,the controversy shows a widening split between two groups who haddiering ideas about the role of poverty in the life of the order,8 andat the general chapter meeting in 1299, Olivis writings were againcondemned.

After Olivis return to southern France, the split between the twogroups back in Italy widened dramatically. When the hermit Pietroda Morrone was, surprisingly, elected pope in 1294, a group of rig-orist Franciscans centered in Ancona, led by Angelo Clareno, appealeddirectly to the new pope. Celestine V recognized this group as anew order, the Poor Hermits of Pope Celestine, in which the formerfriars gave up the Franciscan name but kept the Franciscan rule.9

Within six months, however, Celestine had abdicated, and his successor,Boniface VIII, quickly rescinded all of Celestines legislation, includ-ing that concerning the Poor Hermits, who were put back under thecontrol of their former superiors. This conict escalated over thenext several years until Clement V decided to intervene at the Councilof Vienne; in 1312, he issued the bull Exivi de paradiso, which wasintended to create a compromise between the two groups. The settle-ment, however, was of short duration, and in 1317 John XXII issuedan ultimatum to the Spirituals in southern France, which led to theexecution in the following year of several Franciscans who refused

8 On the usus pauper controversy, see Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 4365; and, for amore extended treatment, Burr, Olivi and Franciscan Poverty: The Origins of the UsusPauper Controversy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

9 Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 69.

dante, peter john olivi, & the franciscan apocalypse 13

to submit to the papal demands. During that same year, the papacymoved against the man who, after Francis, seemed to be the guid-ing light for the Spirituals: Olivi. Following his death and burial inNarbonne in 1298, Olivis body had become a pilgrimage site, andthere were many reports of miracles being wrought by his dead body.Indeed, a kind of informal hagiography was at work in more waysthan one. Angelo Clareno suggested that Joachim of Fiore had fore-told the coming of Olivi as well as the coming of Francis.10 Theleadership of the Church and order moved to squelch this unap-proved veneration, and, in 1318, Olivis body was exhumed andmoved to a new, undisclosed location, and his tomb was destroyed.His most inuential writingthe Lectura super Apocalipsimwas con-demned in 1326. Gradually, the leaders of the Spirituals went else-where, and their movement tended to die out.

During the time that Dante was writing the Commedia, however,the movement, and the controversy surrounding it, was vibrant. Itis obvious that Dante had a great aection for Saint Francis and forthe order he founded, though how far this sympathy carried him isa matter of some debate.11 The best evidence, however, for Dantessympathy for the Franciscans and for the Spiritualist movement withinthe order is in the Paradisos heaven of the sun, whose center pieceis the dual account of the founding of the Franciscans and theDominicans in the thirteenth century. Dante establishes a kind ofsymmetry between the two orders; Saint Thomas Aquinas, the rep-resentative speaker of the Dominicans, tells the life of Francis incanto 11, while Saint Bonaventure, speaking for the Franciscans,praises Dominic by telling of his life in canto 12. The apparent sym-metry, however, masks the subtle ways in which Dante works to

10 Angelo makes this claim in his Historia Septem Tribulationum, found inArchiv fr Litteratur-und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters, ed. H. Denie and F. Ehrle, 7vols. (Berlin, 18851900), 2.289; cited in the Introduction to Warren Lewis disser-tation, Peter John Olivi: Prophet of the Year 2000 (University of Tbingen, 1972),397398, n. 3.

11 There are early rumors, for example, rst proposed in Francesco da Butiscommentary, that Dante had at one point been a Franciscan novice, or that hejoined the third order of lay Franciscans, though this biographical detail may havebeen invented to explain Inferno 16. 10608, where the pilgrim takes o a corda withwhich he had hoped to capture the speckled-skinned leopard. Recent treatmentsof the question include Manselli, Dante e l Ecclesia spiritualis, in Da Gioacchinoda Fiore, 5578; and Nick Havely, Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy inthe Commedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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praise Francis as superior to Dominic, thus showing Dantes greatattraction to Francis and his ideals.12 The life narrated by Aquinas,however, also shows Dantes sympathy for certain elements of theSpiritualist movement. The focal point, for example, of the life thatAquinas recounts is Franciss marriage to Lady Poverty (Paradiso 11.5575), an emphasis that accords with the Spirituals insistence onusus pauper and a literal interpretation of the rule. Dante also takessome pains to emphasize that the earliest Franciscans went barefoot,another point of contention, as the Spirituals complained that, althoughthe rule prohibited the wearing of shoes, most Franciscans commonlywore them.13 Given this context, Dantes insistence that Franciss rstthree disciples all joined him only after removing their shoes, a detailthat Dantes primary source hereBonaventures Legenda Maiordoesnot include, certainly implies that he is anxious to identify what theSpirituals called poor use with the life of Francis and his earlydisciples.14 Later, in fact, Dante characterizes the early apostles inthe same way, as Peter Damian tells the pilgrim that Peter and Paulboth came magri e scalzi, / prendendo il cibo da qualunque ostello(lean and barefoot, taking food at whatever inn [Paradiso 21. 127129]).

12 See Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1992), 194217. There are many works on Dantes por-trayal of Francis in this heaven; see especially the following: Manselli, San Francescoe san Domenico nei canti del Paradiso, in Gioacchino da Fiore, 201211; ErichAuerbach, St. Francis of Assisi in Dantes Commedia, in Scenes from the Drama ofEuropean Literature (1959. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 7998;Ronald Herzman, Dante and Francis, Franciscan Studies 42 (1982): 96114; SergioCristaldi, Dalle beatitudini allApocalisse: Il Nuovo Testamento nella Commedia,Letture Classensi 17 (1988): 3545; Nicol Mineo, Il canto XI del Paradiso (La vitadi San Francesco nella festa di paradiso), in Lectura Dantis Metelliana: I primi undicicanti, ed. Attilio Mellone (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992), 221320; and most recently, Havely,Dante and the Franciscans, 130153.

13 Shoes, for example, were discussed by Ubertino da Casale in response to ques-tions suggested by Clement V in 1310. Burr provides a summary and analysis ofthe document in Spiritual Franciscans, 115127.

14 Dante uses the verb scalzarsi, (to take o ones shoes) three times, in lines8083: Bernardo / si scalz prima . . . Scalzasi Egidio, scalzasi Silvestro. Citationsof the Commedia are according to the Petrocchi text as found in Dante, The DivineComedy, 3 vols., trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press,197075). Unless otherwise noted, all translations (including those of Dante) are myown. It is true, as Havely points out, that Bonaventures Legenda and the BardiDossal painting found in Santa Croce (which Havely sees as a possible source forDante) portray Francis removing his shoes upon his hearing the reading of Matthew10.9 during mass. It is nevertheless revealing that Dante chooses to portray Francissdisciples, and not Francis himself, removing their shoes. Dante also makes similarlypositive statements concerning the importance of poverty in the church in theMonarchia. For a brief discussion, see Havely, 154159.

dante, peter john olivi, & the franciscan apocalypse 15

When these details are juxtaposed, they oer further evidence thatDante saw the early Franciscans as reenacting the life of the earlyapostles. Indeed, Nick Havely has argued that Saint Peters invectivein Paradiso 27 is largely directed not against Boniface VIII, but againstJohn XXII, who was pope when Dante was most likely writing the canto. This pope was notable for his determination to wipe outthe Spirituals, and Dante seems to borrow specic images from theSpiritual polemics against Nicholas, which he places in the mouthof Peter. In particular, Havely argues that Dante draws on Apocalypse17.6 (And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints andwith the blood of the martyrs of Jesus) according to its Spiritualinterpretation, that the image refers to the contemporary carnalChurch in its persecution and martyrdom of Spirituals.15

The proposition that Dante identies with the views and the plightof the Spirituals, however, is complicated by Paradiso 12, in whichBonaventure provides a biography of Dominic before using the Spanishsaints great virtue to criticize the current state of his own order.Whereas the friars used to follow in the footsteps of Francis, nowthey move backward, and they will be surprised at the end of timeto nd themselves judged to be tares rather than wheat. There arestill some faithful, however, who can say I am as I always was:

ma non a da Casal n dAcquasparta,l onde vegnon tali a la scrittura,chuno la fugge e altro la coarta. (12. 124126)

(but they are not from Casale nor from Acquasparta; there, where suchcome to the rule, one ees it and another constricts it.)

The identication of Aquasparta as a place where friars are foundthat do not meet Bonaventures standard is hardly surprising. Danteis most likely referring here to Matthew of Acquasparta, who wasminister general of the order from 128789 and cardinal of theChurch beginning in 1288. Dantes personal antipathy may well derivefrom Matthews role as an agent of Boniface VIII; according to DinoCompagni, Matthew was sent by Boniface to Florence in 1300 tomake peace between the Florentine factions, the Black and WhiteGuelfs, but he acted simply to further Bonifaces interests by sup-porting the Blacks cause and working for the exile of the prominentWhites, including Dante.16 More surprising, in light of Dantes apparent

15 Dante and the Franciscans, 168175.16 Cronica 1.21.

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sympathy for the Spiritualist cause, is his mentioning of Casale. Thisallusion is no doubt to Ubertino da Casale, the prominent spokesmanfor the Spirituals (he was, for example, one of the primary repre-sentatives of the faction at the Council of Vienne) and author of theapocalyptic treatise, Arbor vitae crucixae. Dantes sense that Ubertinoand his followers improperly constrict the rule, together with hischoice of Bonaventure as a spokesman for the Franciscans, impliesthat while he decried the corruption of the order, he was not will-ing to go as far as the more radical Spirituals in his claims.17 Andsince it was common to refer to the Spirituals before 1320 as Ubertinoand his associates, Dantes use of the name here may well be ashorthand reference for the entire faction.18

Most important for our purposes, however, Dante further supportsthe Franciscan reading of history in his insistence that Francis uniquelyrenewed the ideals of the evangelical life through a re-enactment ofthe life of Christ. In Aquinass account of Franciss marriage to LadyPoverty, he notes that Poverty had been deprived of her rst hus-band (Christ) for over 1100 years (Paradiso 11. 6466).19 Further, hedescribes Franciss receipt of the stigmata as his receiving the nalseal from Christ (da Cristo prese lultimo sigillo; 11. 107). Dante seesFrancis as, in some ways, restoring the ideals of Christianity throughhis reenactment of Christs life, an idea that comes through in theopening lines of Aquinass account, when he refers to Franciss birthas that of a sun:

17 While this reading of Par. 12. 12426 is by far the most common, it is possibleto read fugge as referring to Ubertino, who was criticized by some Franciscanleaders for eeing the rule by rst entering the service of his patron, CardinalNapoleone Orsini, and then by becoming a Benedictine in 1317 when he feared thatwere he to return to the Franciscans his life would be in danger. Matthew of Aquaspartawould then be understood as restricting the rule by limiting its requirement ofpoverty to a simple lack of ownership without further including usus pauper.

18 See note 2. This interpretation is disputed by Manselli, who sees Ubertino asone of the more radical of the Spirituals, and that Dantes insistence that Franciscansobserve both poverty and obedience is matched by Olivis views. See Dante elEcclesia spiritualis, 78, n. 57.

19 Havely argues that in canto 11 Francis is primarily a reviver of apostolicideals rather than an alter Christus (130). I would argue, however, that these twothings are not so easily disjoined. Indeed, his marriage to Lady Poverty is portrayed,as noted above, as signicant precisely because Poverty has been a widow since thedeath of Christ, and so in taking up the marriage to Lady Poverty, Francis is alsoimitating Christ.

dante, peter john olivi, & the franciscan apocalypse 17

Di questa costa, l dovella frangepi sua rattezza, nacque al mondo un sole,come fa questo talvolta di Gange.

Per chi desso loco fa parole,non dica Ascesi, ch direbbe corto,ma Orente, se proprio dir vuole. (4954)

(From this slope, there where it breaks its steepness the most, a sunwas born to the world, as this one does sometimes from the Ganges.Therefore who speaks of this place should not say Assisi, which wouldbe to say too little, but Orient, if he wishes to speak correctly.)

Dantes portrayal of Francis as a sun derives from the Francis-can tradition, most immediately from the prologue to BonaventuresLegenda Maior, in which Francis is portrayed as the angel from Apoc-alypse 7. 2:

And so not without reason is he considered to be symbolized by theimage of the Angel who ascends from the sunrise bearing the seal ofthe living God, in the true prophecy of that other friend of theBridegroom, John the Apostle and Evangelist. For when the sixth sealwas opened, John says in the Apocalypse: I saw another angel ascend-ing from the rising of the sun (ascendentem ab ortu solis), having the sealof the living God.20

Bonaventures identication of Francis with the angel of the Apocalypsehas important implications for his view of Franciss role in the his-tory of Christianity. For most Christian exegetes, the Apocalypse wasnot (or not merely) a guide to the future; it presented the key tounderstanding the worlds history. Bonaventures appropriation of theangel of chapter seven for Francis asserts the world-historical signicanceof the saint; Francis is the angel or messenger who takes up thegospel anew and revives it. Dante seems to allude to the angel ofApocalypse 7 in his portrayal of Francis as a sun, implicitly tyingtogether the story of Francis and the Apocalypse. Ronald Herzmanargues that Dante grasps this central idea of Bonaventures Legendaand writes it into his life of Francis: Francis has become a document

20 Translation of the Legenda Maior is taken from Bonaventure: The Souls Journey intoGod, The Tree of Life, The Life of Saint Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins (Mahwah, NJ:Paulist Press, 1978), 181. Bonaventure uses the Apocalypse throughout his biogra-phy in order to understand Francis and his signicance. See Richard K. Emmersonand Ronald B. Herzman, The Legenda Maior: Bonaventures Apocalyptic Francis,in The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 1992), 3675.

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to be read, a document written by God and authenticated by thisseal, which is at the same time proof of his likeness to the cruciedChrist.21 And while Bonaventure saw Francis through the prophe-cies of the Apocalypse, it was the Spirituals who made the mostextensive use of this image and who began to draw on the Apocalypseas a way of understanding, not only Francis, but also the history oftheir order and what they saw as its present decline and corruption.It is to this tradition that we now turn.

The Spiritual Franciscan Apocalypse

As we have seen, many Franciscans, including Saint Bonaventure,saw a renewal or restoration of evangelical truth in the person ofSaint Francis, an interpretation of his life that seemed to be authen-ticated by God himself when Francis received the stigmata in Septemberof 1224 on the mountain top of La Verna. Franciscans who possessedthis sense of their founder and his order were struck when theyturned to the writings of Joachim of Fiore, a Calabrian visionary whoclaimed to have received through revelation the true meaning of theBibles nal book.

Prior to Joachim, the interpretation of the Apocalypse largely fol-lowed interpretive lines laid down by Saint Augustine, who, follow-ing Tyconius,22 discouraged reading the book as if it provided adetailed guide to the unfolding of the future. And while Augustinecertainly accepts the reality of a literal, bodily resurrection and anal judgment,23 he has little interest in trying to decipher a timetablefor the second coming of Christ. Instead, the tribulations and blessed-ness described by John in such vivid detail refer to the life of theChurch now, since it is always divided between wheat and tares.24

21 Ronald B. Herzman, Dante and the Apocalypse, in The Apocalypse in the MiddleAges, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1992), 407.

22 Tyconius was a lay theologian contemporary to Augustine, about whom we knowlittle, as only one of his works survives. He was a Donatist, though an independent-minded one, and he had a profound inuence on Augustine. He wrote a commentaryon the Apocalypse that has not survived.

23 See for example, on his discussion of the last judgment, De civitate dei, 20; onthe resurrection, see De civitate dei, 22. 45.

24 For a concise account of Augustines reading, see Paula Frederiksen, Tyconiusand Augustine on the Apocalypse, in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, 2037; and

dante, peter john olivi, & the franciscan apocalypse 19

This reading of the Apocalypse remained standard until Joachim,who oered a new interpretation based on a Trinitarian conceptionof history: there were three ages of world history, each governed byone member of the Trinity. These ages, however, overlapped withone beginning while the previous age was still well under way. Thus,the age of God the Father corresponded to the history of the worldfrom Adam to the incarnation (corresponding to the Old Testament),and was characterized by Joachim as the time of the order of themarried; the age of God the Son corresponded roughly to the timeof the New Testament through the present day, though it began withKing Josiah (d. 609 B.C.), and it was the age of the clerics; the nalage of history, that of God the Holy Spirit, had already been inau-gurated with Saint Benedict, but it would soon ourish and ulti-mately result in a renewal of religious life in the great age of themonastic orders. Joachim read this tripartite structure of history inthe Apocalypse and, like the Franciscans, saw history moving towardrenewal. Even more appealing to the Franciscans was his reading ofthe two witnesses of chapter eleven (verses 313) as representing twonew orders of spiritual men who would help to usher in the nalage or status of the Holy Spirit, which many Franciscans saw as refer-ring to themselves.25

Joachims apocalyptic views and his views of the Trinity were con-sidered suspect at best (the Fourth Lateran Council condemned hisview of the Trinity in 1215),26 and Franciscans who began to preach

Frederiksens entry, Apocalypticism, in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed.Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 4953. In this last entry,she concludes: He created a third way, reading ad litteramhistorically but not lit-erallyand thus armed the historical realism of Christian redemption whilerenouncing any terrestrial eschatology (53). Frederiksen here uses literally in itsmodern rather than ancient sense (which was precisely to read ad litteram).

25 On Joachim, see: Marjorie Reeves, The Inuence of Prophecy in the Latter Middle Ages:A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1132; Bernard McGinn, TheCalabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (New York: Macmillan,1985); and Gian Luca Potest, Il tempo dellApocalisse: vita di Gioacchino da Fiore (Rome:Laterza, 2004). More concise accounts include E. Randolph Daniel, Joachim of Fiore:Patterns of History in the Apocalypse, in Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, 7288; andRichard K. Emmerson and Ronald B. Herzman, The Apocalypse and Joachim ofFiore: Keys to the Medieval Apocalyptic Imagination, in Apocalyptic Imagination, 135.For a general overview of how the Franciscans approached the Apocalypse, see GianLuca Potest, I francescani e la Bibbia nel 200 (Milan: Biblioteca Francescana, 1994).

26 As Richard Emmerson notes, however, Joachim himself was never brandeda heretic and was proclaimed orthodox by Honorius III in 1220. See his entry,Joachim of Fiore, in The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Lansing (New York:Garland, 2000), 537538.

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Joachite ideas began to attract unwanted attention to the order. Themost famous example was Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, who in1254 published a work entitled Evangelium aeternum (The EverlastingGospel), a work that was to combine three of Joachims major writ-ings together with an introduction and commentary by Gerard, thoughit is doubted that this full work ever appeared. Instead, we knowthat Paris booksellers did sell an abbreviated version that containedGerards introduction and Joachims Liber de concordia. Gerards intro-duction does not survive, but if the accounts of it (and the excerptsof it contained in the accounts) are to be believed, it was by medievalstandards an extreme and heretical document, which argued that theperiod of the Apostles was to be surpassed by the coming third age,and that the Scriptures themselves would soon be proved inadequate.According to the Franciscan chronicler Salimbene of Parma, Gerardargued that the gospel of Christ and the doctrine of the New Testamentdid not lead to perfection and were to be superseded in 1260.27

The release of the introduction was particularly ill-timed, as it cor-responded with the height of the controversy in Paris between thesecular masters of the university and the mendicants who, the secularsthought, were stealing their students and destroying the proper func-tioning of the university. The secular masters seized on this documentas evidence of the dangerous ideas of the mendicants, and in 1255Gerards introduction was condemned by Pope Alexander IV. Theresult was reluctance by Franciscans openly to embrace Joachim.John of Parma, who was minister general of the order during thescandal over the Everlasting Gospel, was pressured to resign becausehe was known to hold Joachite views. Bonaventure, who succeededJohn as minister general in 1257 upon Johns recommendation, felt

27 Cited in David Burr, Olivis Peaceable Kingdom: A Reading of the Apocalypse Commentary(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 17. 1260 was an importantyear for Joachites, as the pseudo-Joachim Commentary on Jeremiah, probably writtenin the early 1240s, predicted that 1260 would mark a denite transition to the thirdand nal age of world history, a calculation based upon Joachims notion that therewould be 42 generations, each consisting of 30 years (for a total length of 1260years) between the advent of Christ and full coming of the third age. See BernardMcGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1979), 159. Manselli argues that Dante would have known thiscommentary, based upon the similarity between Inf. 27.85, which refers to Bonifaceas the principe de novi farisei and the commentary that refers to the clergy obnovorum phariseorum superbiam et scribarum, as well as other similarities. SeeDa Gioacchino da Fiore, 6364.

dante, peter john olivi, & the franciscan apocalypse 21

obliged to put his predecessor on trial for his Joachite views.28 Bona-venture, however, as we have seen, was also drawn to the apocalypseand Joachims interpretation of it as a way of making sense ofChristian history and the place of his order within that history. Wemust, therefore, view his condemnation of John of Parmas views asinvolving political expediency or perhaps some aspect of his apocalyptic-ism with which Bonaventure disagreed rather than with the entireapocalyptic project.

This discussion leads us to the central gure in considering theFranciscan Apocalypse: Peter John Olivi. He proves to be an importantgure in the development of the Spiritualist movement not onlybecause of his views on poverty which we have already briey dis-cussed, but also because of his longstanding interest in the Apocalypse.29

His commentary was frequently read and cited by Spirituals followinghis death, and it became so troublesome that, as mentioned above,it was eventually condemned in 1326. Indeed, the Inquisitor BernardGui comments that many of the Beguins30 looked to Olivi for theiropinions, especially to his Apocalypse commentary, which they possessedboth in Latin and in vernacular translation.31 There is thus goodevidence that it circulated widely in the early years of the fourteenthcentury, and it is therefore possible that Dante would have seen thecommentary.

The question of Dantes knowledge of Olivi is a debated one. Thebasic facts are these: Dante never mentions Olivi in any of his works,but his use of the Apocalypse and his view on certain issues are

28 The story is told by Moorman, 145146, and by Burr, Olivis Peaceable Kingdom,714.

29 David Burr and others have shown that although Olivis commentary on theApocalypse dates from the end of his life, he had an interest in apocalypticism earlyon, and it inuenced most of his work prior to the writing of the commentary. See,e.g., Burr, Persecution, 1724.

30 The term Beguin refers to members of the third order of Franciscans, especiallythose in southern France inuenced by Olivi and devoted to the principles of theSpirituals. It is not to be confused with Beguines, which refers to a movementof female communal spirituality. For a convenient summary of the two phenomena,see the entries by Robert E. Lerner, Beguines and Beghards, and Beguins inThe Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph Strayer (New York: Scribner, 1982), 2.157162, 162163.

31 Bernard Gui, Manuel de linquisiteur, 2 vols., ed. G. Mollat (Paris: Champion,1926), 1. 110: quod errores suos et opiniones hujusmodi pestiferas ipsi habuerunt etcollegerunt partim quidem ex libris seu opusculis fratris Petri Johannis Olivi . . . videlicetex postilla ejusdem super Apocalipsim quam habent tam in latino quam etiam trans-positam in vulgari.

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similar to those of Olivi.32 Olivi taught as a lector in Santa Crocefrom 128789, and Dante may have met him then. Dante tells usin the Convivio that at one point in his life he began to frequent theschools of the religious and the debates of the philosophers, whichmost commentators have identied as the schools attached to theFranciscan and Dominican churches Santa Croce and Santa MariaNovella,33 though Dante identies this time as following the deathof Beatrice in 1290. Nevertheless, Charles T. Davis has suggestedthat Dantes education at Santa Croce antedated that time. RaoulManselli thinks it unlikely that Dante met Olivi, though he thinksit certain that he did know Olivis work, as Olivis inuence continuedat Santa Croce throughout the fourteenth century and into thefteenth; and, as we have seen, Dante certainly knew the work ofOlivis student in Florence, Ubertino da Casale.34 A man who wasa charismatic and popular thinker would no doubt have attractedthe attention of a well-educated and curious layman with undoubtedsympathies for the Franciscan order, such as Dante.35

If we are to gain an appreciation, then, of both the FranciscanApocalypse and Dantes knowledge of and sympathy for it, we cando no better than turn to Olivis commentary. We will begin witha brief overview of the reading of the Apocalypse presented in hiscommentary before turning to Dantes poem and the specic uses

32 Manselli suggests that the reason for Dantes silence on Olivi is Dantes awarenessof the controversy surrounding the Franciscan. See Mansellis entry on Olivi in theEnciclopedia Dantesca, ed. Umberto Bosco, 6 vols. (Rome: Istituto dell EnciclopediaItaliana, 197078), 4. 135137. Other recent attempts to discuss the relationshipbetween the two men include: Nicol Mineo, Gli spirituali francescani e lApocalissedi Dante, La rassegna della letteratura italiana 102 (1998): 2646; Alberto Forni, Pietrodi Giovanni Olivi e Dante, ovvero il panno e la gonna, in Pierre de Jean Olivi(12481298): Pense scolastique, dissidence spirituelle et socit, ed. Alain Boureau andSylvain Piron (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1999), 341352.

33 Convivio 2. 12. 7: E da questo imaginare cominciai ad andare l dovella sidimostrava veracemente, cio ne le scuole de li religiosi e a le disputazioni de lilosofanti. I cite the Convivio, ed. Cesare Vasoli and Domenico de Robertis, inDante Alighieri: Opere Minori, volume 2, parts 1 and 2 (1988. Milan: Ricciardi, 1995).See the extended notes from this edition on this passage in part 1, pages 205210.

34 Charles T. Davis, Education in Dantes Florence, in Dantes Italy and OtherEssays (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 137165. Manselli,Dante e lEcclesia spiritualis, 67; and Firenze nel Trecento: Santa Croce e lacultura francescana, in Da Gioacchino da Fiore, 257273.

35 I too think it very likely that Dante knew Olivis work and possibly Olivi him-self. Because Olivis commentary was so widespread and so inuential on Franciscanthinking about the Apocalypse, I have chosen to concentrate on the similaritiesbetween Olivi and Dante as a way of gaining a sense of Dantes indebtedness tothe Franciscan Apocalypse.

dante, peter john olivi, & the franciscan apocalypse 23

he makes of the Apocalypse there, and how these uses relate toOlivis views of that biblical book.

Olivis Lectura super Apocalipsim

Peter John Olivi felt that he had an understanding of the Apocalypsethat was superior to those that preceded him, but this comprehen-sion was due more to his place in history than it was to his skills asan exegete. His moment in history was propitious for gaining a fullerknowledge of the book because of the spiritual gifts that the periodenjoyed (exemplied in Joachim) and also because, during the expanseof time since the writing of the Apocalypse, certain features of worldhistory had become apparent.

For in the previous ve ages of the Church it was not granted to thesaints, however inspired, to open up the secrets of this book, whichwere to be opened more fully only in the sixth and seventh ages, justas neither in the rst ve ages of the Old Testament was it grantedto prophets to open clearly the secrets of Christ and of the NewTestament but only in the sixth age of the world.36

This passage reveals a few things about Olivis grasp of the Apocalypseand his understanding of history that proves central to it.37 First, hesees history as a progressive unfolding, and it allows for increasedknowledge along the way. Second, he sees history as divided intodierent periods or ages. This feature of his apocalyptic thoughtderives ultimately from the Apocalypse itself, but it is mediatedthrough several centuries of tradition.

36 Nam in prioribus quinque ecclesie statibus non fuit concessum sanctis, quan-tumcumque illuminatis, aperire illa secreta huius libri, que in solo sexto et septimostatu erant apertius reseranda, sicut nec in primis quinque etatibus veteris testamentifuit prophetis concessum clare aperire secreta Christi et novi testamenti in sextaetate seculi reserandis et reseratis. I cite Olivis Lectura super Apocalipsim accordingto the only modern critical edition available, contained in the doctoral thesis ofWarren Lewis, op. cit. This citation is found on page 564. Further references tothe Lectura will occur in the text. Lewis is currently at work on revising and pub-lishing this edition, and he has been kind enough to send me revised versions ofseveral portions of the text.

37 My understanding of the Lectura super Apocalipsim has been shaped primarily bythree studies: Raoul Manselli, La Lectura super Apocalipsim di Pietro di Giovanni Olivi:Ricerche sullescatologismo medioevale (Rome: Istituto storico Italiano per il medio evo,1955); Warren Lewiss introduction to his dissertation, Ecclesiology and Eschatologyin the Lectura super Apocalipsim; and Burr, Olivis Peaceable Kingdom. Lewis also pro-vides a useful summary of the history of scholarship on Olivis commentary up tothe time of his dissertation on pages 91117.

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The Book of Revelation is lled with sevens. Chapters two andthree contain seven letters, one to each of the seven churches inAsia. In chapters four through eight we hear about the opening ofthe seven seals. In chapter fteen we learn that there are seven angelsthat have seven vials that they later open in order to unleash plaguesupon the world. Medieval exegetes, therefore, saw seven as an orga-nizing principle not only of the scriptural book but also of the his-tory of the world that it recounts. Olivi was no exception, and hesaw world history divided into seven great ages. The rst ve cor-respond to times before the coming of Christ; the birth of Christsignaled the dawning of the sixth age of world history. This historywas also organized, however, into the tripartite division of Father,Son, and Holy Spirit that Olivi found in Joachim.38 Moreover, worldhistory was subdivided into two further divisions corresponding tothe Old and New Testaments, and each of these divisions also pos-sessed seven ages or status. But these seven ages from the two partsof the Bible also had a typological relationship of anticipation andfulllment with each other; the New Testament ages referred backto and also fullled those of the Old Testament, a relationship whichJoachim referred to as concordia. These various divisions and ageshave a complex, overlapping correlation.39 For our purposes, how-ever, the most important aspect of his theory concerns his seven agesof the history of the Church following the advent of Christ, whichcorrespond to the great ages of the Son and the Holy Spirit, andwe will therefore concentrate on these (and in fact the bulk of hiscommentary is concerned with this aspect of world history).

We can summarize the seven periods of Church history as follows:

First period time of the apostles, who combat JudaismSecond period time of the martyrs, who ght the persecution of the

pagansThird period time of the Church fathers, who dispute with the

heretics

38 Manselli rejected the suggestion that Joachim had any special meaning for Olivibeyond that of other exegetes: insisteremo nel dire che lOlivi considera Gioacchinouna auctoritas come tutte le altre (186). Most scholars now, however, agree withMarjorie Reeves who insisted that, pace Manselli, Olivi was a Joachite. See Prophecyin the Later Middle Ages, 195197.

39 Lewis provides a useful Chart of Sevens that outlines the concordancesbetween the various sevens that Olivi identies in his commentary. See Ecclesiologyand Eschatology, 131139.

dante, peter john olivi, & the franciscan apocalypse 25

Fourth period time of the anchorites, who oppose hypocritesFifth period time of the monks, who ght the growing wealth

of the ChurchSixth period time of the friars or the Church of evangelical per-

fectionSeventh period time of the Church of the peaceful sabbath40

These divisions were not strictly separate; thus, one would not beginneatly as the other ended. Rather, these periods overlap, sometimesfor considerable lengths of time. The importance of this schema liesin its overall understanding of history rather than its strict chronologicalaccuracy. The time in which Olivi lived, for instance, was simulta-neously the end of the fth period and the beginning of the sixth.

As far as the content of Olivis schema is concerned, as DavidBurr points out, in Olivis time the rst four divisions of Church his-tory were fairly standard; it is in the fth, sixth, and seventh periodsthat Olivi begins to chart new ground and provide a more Franciscanreading of the progress of history.41 Instead of seeing the fth ageas the age of the precursors of the Antichrist, Olivi sees it as theculmination of the growth of the Church in power and wealth, aprocess that also contributes to its corruption so that, by the end ofthis age, it is completely rotten. Around the end of the fth time,from the souls of the feet up to the head the entire Church is undoneand brought into confusion almost as if it were made into a newBabylon.42 This period also sees the advent of the mystical Antichrist,who opens the door for the true Antichrist, which results in thepersecution of the elect; the mystical Antichrist may well be a pseudopope who attacks those who follow Franciscan poverty. Eventually,the new Babylon and its leaders are destroyed by a pagan (most likelyMoslem) army. Nevertheless, this period is also a time of renewal, asit corresponds with the beginning of the sixth period, which begins withthe revelations of Joachim and the coming of Francis and his followers.43

Olivi follows Bonaventure here by recognizing Francis as the angel

40 This brief summary is based on Lewis, Ecclesiology and Eschatology, 140141;Burr, Persecution, 1820; and Burr, Olivis Peaceable Kingdom, 7577.

41 Burr, Olivis Peaceable Kingdom, 76.42 circa nem quinti temporis a planta pedis usque ad verticem est fere tota

ecclesia infecta et confusa et quasi nova Babilon eecta (52).43 Burr notes that Olivi recognizes not one but several beginnings for the sixth

period, including Joachims prophecies, the establishment of the Franciscan order,the preaching of spiritual men, and the destruction of Babylon. See Persecution, 19.

26 v.s. benfell iii

of the sixth seal from Apocalypse 7. 2. The sixth and seventh agescorrespond to Joachims third age of the Holy Spirit, and in themOlivi nds the nal great temptation of the elect with the comingof the great Antichrist, who may well be a new pseudo pope whosupports the pagan (or Moslem) temporal leader and who leads anattack on Christian doctrine through paths opened up by the Aris-totelian philosophy of Olivis time.44 At his death, however, thepromise of Christian renewal will be realized, and the evangelicallife taught and lived by Christ and his apostles will be reestablishedand ourish in a way not yet seen on earth. This is not to say thatFrancis and his followers supersede Christ and the apostles, an impli-cation Olivi was always anxious to avoid. Nevertheless, while Francisis only the one who restores or renews the evangelical life, he ends upinitiating a historical process that culminates in a great age of peacethat supersedes all other historical periods.45 Olivi sees the historicalprocess, in other words, as involving both restoration and progression.Francis renews the evangelical ideal so that it can spread and per-meate earthly life in an unprecedented way.

One other aspect of Olivis Lectura deserves mention: the timingof apocalyptic events. Unlike Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, Oliviis very tentative in his suggestion of concrete dates for the unfold-ing of apocalyptic events. While he is quite certain that he is livingat the end of the fth period and the beginning of the sixth, andthat the events that will precipitate the end of the sixth age and thestart of the seventh and nal age are near at hand, he resists assigningconcrete dates to them, and he often in fact proposes several possibilities.We should be careful, though, to avoid making Olivis exegesis overlyAugustinian. Burr writes, concerning Olivis timetable, that [h]owevergeneral the numbers may be, they regularly place the destruction ofBabylon and the temptation of the great Antichrist somewhere inthe rst four decades of the fourteenth century.46 It is in this expectant

44 For a detailed consideration of the question of how we should view these twoAntichrists, something beyond the scope of this essay, see Burrs chapter TheDouble Antichrist, in Olivis Peaceable Kingdom, 132162.

45 This view too, though, was considered heretical. For a detailed considerationof the degree of Olivis heresy, see Warren Lewis, Peter John Olivi, Author of theLectura Super Apocalipsim: Was He Heretical? in Pierre de Jean Olivi (12481298),135156. Lewis argues that [b]y the standards of his time . . . Olivi was hereticalin his ecclesiology and his eschatology (147).

46 See Burrs chapter, The Apocalyptic Timetable, in Olivis Peaceable Kingdom,163178. The citation is found on 176.

dante, peter john olivi, & the franciscan apocalypse 27

vagueness, however, that we nd a parallel with Dante, who, in hisnumerous prophecies within the Commedia, frequently asserts the near-ness of divine intervention while remaining stubbornly vague aboutparticulars, asserting (as Beatrice does at the end of the Purgatorio)that the events of history will solve the puzzle.47

Even with this brief overview, it should be apparent why it is plau-sible that Dante would have found Olivis commentary on theApocalypse sympathetic. Dante too felt that the Church had becomeincreasingly corrupt and was in desperate need of reform, and hetoo saw in history a providential pattern that promised divine inter-vention in the near future. And we have already seen that, like Olivi,he saw an apocalyptic signicance in Saint Francis. The questionthen arises: to what degree did Dantes use of the Apocalypse accordwith that of Olivi, and how similar is his own view of the unfold-ing of history to that of the Spiritual Franciscans? In order to answerthis question we must turn again to the Commedia itself for a con-sideration of two key moments where the Apocalypse of John formsan especially crucial subtext: Inferno 19 and Purgatorio 32.

Inferno 19

Canto 19 occupies a unique place in the Inferno. Unlike the cantosthat surround it, the canto of the simonists has an elevated tone thatculminates in the pilgrims biblical denunciation of papal simony,and it is the only canto in the poems rst canticle in which theBible has a positive and direct role to play, and which includes animportant citation of the Apocalypse.48 Furthermore, this canto hasa number of ties to the Franciscans. For example, when the pilgrimapproaches Pope Nicholas III, who is unrecognizable because he isplanted upside down in one of the holes that dot the oor of thisbolgia, he describes himself as standing like a friar (Io stava come l frate) over the gure of the Pope (19. 49). This canto therefore

47 ma tosto er li fatti le Naiade, / che solveranno questo enigma forte (Purg.33. 4950).

48 For a fuller treatment of canto 19, especially as it relates to the Bibles placewithin the canto, see my Prophetic Madness: The Bible in Inferno XIX, MLN 110(1995): 14563; reprinted in Dante: The Critical Complex, ed. Richard Lansing, vol. 4,Dante and Theology: The Biblical Tradition and Christian Allegory (New York and London:Routledge, 2003), 32341.

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proves to be an excellent place to begin looking for Dantes Apocalypseand for understanding to what degree it accords with Olivis.

In this canto, Dante portrays the simonists, those guilty of buyingand selling spiritual goods, especially Church oces.49 We have alreadyseen that, for Olivi, the fth period was one of laxity in which theChurch became completely corrupted, and he saw simony as one ofthe dening sins, if not the dening sin, of this fth period. Thus,in the prologue to the Lectura, he writes

Among the laxities, however, we must understand simony, by whichall ecclesiastical things are sold and bought by everyone, and they areconsidered almost venial things, and again the eager and avariciousabuses of ecclesiastical possessions and legacies and innumerable andhorrendous fornications, with which the divine sacraments are managed.50

Whether Dante knew this commentary or not, he certainly accordswith Olivi in identifying simony as one of the dening elements ofChurch corruption, and one that was directly prophesied in theApocalypse. It is intriguing that Olivi associates simony with fornication,an association that Dante also makes; in fact, beginning with thecantos opening lines, it becomes the dening metaphor of Inferno 19:

O Simon mago, o miseri seguaciche le cose di Dio, che di bontatedeon essere spose, e voi rapaci

per oro e per argento avolterate,or convien che per voi suoni la trombaper che ne la terza bolgia state. (Inferno 19. 16)

(O Simon Magus, o wretched followers that the things of God, whichshould be brides of goodness, you rapacious ones adulterate for goldand for silver; now it is time that the trumpet sound for you, as youare in the third pouch.)

Dante here draws upon the commonplace of the Church as the brideof Christ, which is instead made to fornicate, or even more, to prostituteitself for the goods of this world. Unlike Olivi, however, who remarks

49 For a brief overview of simony in Dante, see my entry, Simony, in the DanteEncyclopedia, 782. For an extensive consideration of the rise of simony in the MiddleAges, see Joseph H. Lynch, Simonaical Entry into Religious Life from 1000 to 1260(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976).

50 Inter laxationes autem intellige simonias, quibus omnia ecclesiastica fere abomnibus venduntur et emuntur et quasi venalia reputantur, et iterum ambitiosos etavaros abusus ecclesiasticarum possessionum et reddituum et fornicationes innumeraset horrendas, cum quibus divina sacramenta tractantur (29).

dante, peter john olivi, & the franciscan apocalypse 29

that simony is practiced by almost everyone, Dante limits simony toa few papal examples, whom he blames for the corruption of theChurch as a whole. After Nicholas describes, in addition to his ownwickedness, that of Boniface who is now alive, and that of ClementV to come, Dante has the pilgrim speak seemingly to all of the papalsimonists, past (Nicholas III), present (Boniface VIII), and future(Clement V): la vostra avarizia il mondo attrista, / calcando i buonie sollevando i pravi (your avarice saddens the world, tramplingthe good and raising up the depraved [19. 10405]). It is neverthelessprecisely in criticizing the corruption of the Church and identifyingits corruption with its avaricious papal leaders, that Dante comesclose to the views of Olivi and other Spiritual Franciscans. And itis in linking this critique of Church corruption to the Apocalypseand a vision of providential history that Dante approaches the Spiritualseven more closely. This is not to say that many thirteenth-centuryexegetes of the Apocalypse did not link the corruption of prelateswith the precursors of the Antichrist; many did. What dierentiatesboth Olivi and Dante is their inclusion of the popes in the generalcorruption of the Church. For Dante in particular, papal corruptionis primarily responsible for the widespread degeneration of the Church.

Toward the end of the canto Dante turns to the Apocalypse as away of making sense of papal simony. Following Nicholas IIIs descrip-tion of his own sins, and those of Clement to come, the pilgrimlaunches into a biblically laced invective against the popes. Duringthe rst part of this speech, the pilgrim uses the Bible in an almostProtestant fashion, treating the New Testament portraits of the Churchand its leaders as normative models, which he then uses to judgethe popes who deviate from their biblical exemplars. The Lord, unlikecontemporary simonists, did not ask for treasure from Saint Peterbefore giving him the keys of the Church; he only asked for disci-pleship. Similarly, Peter and his colleagues in their turn did not askMatthias for gold or silver when they oered him Judas Iscariotsplace among the apostles.51

After accusing Nicholas of a specic act of simony,52 Dante con-tinues his denunciation while expressing hesitancy over his bold words.

E se non fosse chancor lo mi vieta

51 See Inf. 19. 9096.52 guarda ben la mal tolta moneta/chesser ti fece contra Carlo ardito (19.

9899). This seems to refer to the belief that Nicholas III used the funds of the

30 v.s. benfell iii

la reverenza de le somme chiaviche tu tenesti ne la vita lieta,

io userei parole ancor pi gravi. (Inferno 19. 10003)

(And if the reverence for the highest keys that you held during thehappy life did not prohibit it to me, I would use even harsher words.)

Earlier, Dante had also expressed reluctance over the pilgrims wordsby wondering if they were troppo folle, (too foolish). As UmbertoBosco has argued in his classic essay on Dantes follia, Dantesfolly or madness here and throughout the poem refers not to a con-dition of mental instability but to a certain spiritual attitude char-acterized by a transgressive desire to exceed lawful limits, a meaningreinforced here by the qualier troppo.53 But we may also see inDantes use of this word the Franciscan exaltation of folly over worldlywisdom, just as Francis purposefully assumed the role of fool forChrists sake.54

Dantes biblical citations reach their climax with a turn to theApocalypse, as he nds in the papal simonists the fulllment of apoc-alyptic prophecy.

Di voi pastor saccorse il Vangelista,quando colei che siede sopra lacqueputtaneggiar coi regi a lui fu vista;

quella che con le sette teste nacque,e da le diece corna ebbe argomento,n che virtute al suo marito piacque. (Inferno 19. 106111)

(The Evangelist saw you pastors, when she who sits on the waters for-nicating with kings was seen by him; she who was born with sevenheads, and who had strength from the ten horns, as long as virtuepleased her husband.)

The imagery that the pilgrim uses here derives from chapter 17 ofthe Apocalypse, and we rst need to come to an understanding ofhow Dantes use of this imagery accords with his biblical source.The rst three verses of Apocalypse 17 read as follows:

church to oppose Charles I of Anjou; it may even refer to the rumor (now discredited)that Nicholas