Papal refuseniks: Benedict XVI checks out the tomb of Celestin V
As a long-time friend and admirer of the great dantista Robert Hollander, and a
sometime apprentice in the fabulous summer seminars he has conducted in a
thirteenth-century Tuscan castle, I have learned to sing along with the chorus
of Dantolators for whom the poet can do no wrong—and I mean none at all. Even Homer may nod, and for all his
greatness my guy, Geoffrey Chaucer, published some fairly dubious stuff, such
as the following account of the failure of medicine to save the dying Arcite:
Hym
gayneth neither, for to gete his lif,
Vomyt
upward, ne downward laxatif.
But I am required to believe that Dante never errs, that
every line is spun gold, and every idea platinum.
But
as Milton’s Satan says, “The mind is its own place.” And I have to tell you from that undisclosed location that I
think there is some—not much, but some--pretty
dumb stuff in the Divine Comedy. There! I said it!
Dante and his guide Virgil are barely through the famous gate of Hell
before we get a real lollapalooza.
There in Hell’s waiting room, so to speak, are the Trimmers, the morally
inert, the lukewarms, the neither fish nor fowl, the spiritual Thyatyrans of
the ages. These folk are being stung by wasps and hornets. Their mingled blood and tears drip down
to attract stinking worms around their feet. Not nice. Dante
gives us only one representative human member of these tormented sadsacks. He recognizes “the shade of him who, through
cowardice, made the great refusal [gran
rifiuto].”
Learned
annotators explain that this has to be the shade of Pope Celestin V, the emaciated
old man who resigned the papacy in 1294 less than a year after accepting
it. Yesterday I saw strings of
interviews with people, mainly distraught, lamenting the announced retirement of the current pope. Two of them actually brought up Celestin
V, whose name I had never before heard mentioned in half a century of loyal
viewing. I am sure these people
got it from Dante, also the attitude.
Both of them were steaming mad at the pope.
Well,
not me. I admire him. But then I also admire Celestin V. Celestin V was anything but a
coward. He was an octogenarian
holy hermit, and it didn’t take him long to conclude that the chair of Peter
was, in that age, no place for a religious person. The cardinals agreed; they didn’t elect another one for
quite a while.
I
am not a Roman Catholic, but I have had a special reason—I’ll come to it in a
minute—to follow the career of Benedict XVI. Hence I am aware that he has often been criticized as a
hide-bound traditionalist trapped in yesterday’s moral theology. Well, he has just struck a powerful
blow for modernity. The idea that
the pope is a spiritual monarch who must hold up his orb in his palsied hand
until dementia or prostate cancer finally carries him off lacks theological warrant,
common sense, or simple Christian charity.
Recently, when
the Archbishop of Canterbury resigned and went on to become the head of a
Cambridge college, I regarded it as an episode in an upward trajectory. But of course I am a college professor,
which is what the pope also was so many years ago. That’s why I knew him before many of you did. I knew him as Professor Joseph
Ratzinger, the author of a brilliant book* about St. Bonaventure’s theology of
history. This is one of those
books that—granting a preliminary interest in its admittedly arcane subject
matter—simply knocks you off your feet.
There are only a few books the reading of which actually changes the
direction of a scholar’s work. For
me, this was such a book. Without
it I hardly would have stuck my toe into the subject of Franciscan studies.
I
had no idea who Ratzinger was, of course.
I didn’t particularly want to know. One of the joys of academic study is encountering the disembodied
minds of other people a thousand miles or a thousand years away, completely
independent of personal or biographical speculation. He had been pope for two or three years before I tumbled to
the fact it was the same guy.
Dante checks out the tomb of Boniface VIII
Dante
didn’t really know squat about Celestin V. He was simply furious that Boniface VIII, who he thought was
a really bad guy, was able to leap
into the breach. So I’ll forgive
his little poetical hissy-fit. But
whatever else resigning the papacy might be, it can hardly be an emblem of
“cowardice” [viltade]. I wish Professor Ratzinger even longer life and
good health, and I shall hope, selfishly, for another dynamite book.
*Geschichtstheologie des heiligen Bonaventura
(1959); English translation The Theology of History in Saint Bonaventure
(1971)
