Inferno: Canto 11 -- Circle 6

2004-09-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

With the zeal of a Jesuit on the missionary hunt for souls to save, Fr. Earl has raced into Canto XI ahead of my morning post, I see. I did something similar in Egypt, once, on the cliffs leading down to the tomb of Hatshepsut on a mule trail where two side-by-side would have been too much. Caught up in the idea of the thousand-foot drop to my right, I saw an opening in the trail and thought that by guiding my mule toward it in advance of my guide's that I'd be in a better position to cling to the wall of rock on my left. This post and all that has preceded it is a result of divine mercy, not justice.

As we sit on the rim of Circle Seven waiting for our noses to grow accustomed to the stench that awaits us below -- we'll have to do this again often depending upon how delicate our other pilgrims prove themselves to be -- we ought to reflect for a moment on yet another Pope in hell since it's the only instance where we'll see a conflict between Eastern and Western Christianity treated -- Dante could have dealt with Anastasius in Canto XXVIII among the schismatics, but he treats him here among the heretics (which means, Anastasius suffers for a lesser sin) and says no more about the schism between the Eastern and Western churches that would have occurred in the fifth century between these two halves of the Church nor about any other schism (even the big one that Dante would have known about in 1054 and which, as way leads on to way, is presently embodied in our very own, Dr. Andrew J. Sopko, whose videos in today's activities board are helpful in understanding the differences within greater Christendom.

Henry Wace, in A Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature to the End of the Sixth Century A.D., with an Account of the Principal Sects and Heresies provides a short account of this pope. "Anastasius II., bp. of Rome, succeeded Gelasius I. in Nov. 496 (Clinton's Fasti Romani, pp. 536, 713). The month after his accession Cloves was baptized, and the new Pope wrote congratulating him on his conversion. Anastasius has left a name of ill-odour in the Western church; attributable to his having taken a different line from his predecessors with regard to the Eastern church. Felix III. had excommunicated Acacius of Constantinople, professedly on account of his communicating with heretics, but really because Zeno's Henoticon, which he had sanctioned, gave the church of Constantinople a primacy in the East which the see of Rome could not tolerate. Gelasius I. had followed closely in the steps of Felix. But Anastasius, in the year of his accession, sent two bishops, Germanus of Capua and Cresconius of Todi, (Baronius) to Constantinople, with a proposal that Acacius's name, instead of being expunged from the roll of pariarchs of Constantinople as Gelasius had proposed, should be left upon the diptychs, and no more be said upon the subject. This proposal, in the very spirit of the Henoticon, gave lasting offence to the Western church, and it excites no surprise that he was charged with communicating secretly with Photinus, a deacon of Thessalonica who held with Acacius; and of wishing to heal the breach between the East and West ?for so it seems best to interpret the words of Anastasius Bibliothecarius?"voluit revocare Acacium" (vol. i. p. 83). Anastasius died in Nov. 498. He was still remembered as the traitor who would have reversed the excommunication of Acacius; and Dante finds him suffering in hell the punishment of one whom "Fotino" seduced from the right way (Dante, Inf. xi. 8, 9)."

Ciardi introduces the idea that Dante might have confused Anastasius II, who was pope, with Anastasius I, who was Emperor, for it was the Emperor whom Deacon Photinus persuaded to accept the Acacian heresy that "denied the divine paternity of Christ" (93). In either case, though, Anastasius the Pope, according to Wace, did not seek to correct this heresy but also did not seek a schism, which is why he's punished with the heretics and not with the schismatics.

The beauty of Dante, of course, is that he's able to imply all that in one stanza though it takes many paragraphs to break it apart. The rest of the canto, then, moves us forward in our understanding of the structure of hell and the role of philosophy within it. We learn that we're about to enter lower hell proper, where lie waiting for us the violent, the fraudulent, and the treacherous. The divisions between upper and lower hell are explained to be that between the sins of our bestial natures and the sins of our human faculties. We see in here the kernels of a yet unarticulated Renaissance (and we'll find it again in Ulysses, who will proclaim to his men that we, humans, were not meant to live like brutes, but to exercise our spirits in pursuit of the world -- naturally, that kind of thinking got him further than he imagined when he set out), which called man to, in today's terms, be all that he could be. Dante has Virgil stop short of expressing any virtuous turn of human reason directed toward the world and not G-d, however, and we find ourselves squarely back in the Medieval world, but a world which has benefited considerably from the thinking of Aristotle in regards to social responsibility and viable human relationships -- in the Nicomachean Ethics, upon which Dante's structure is built and which we'll have the opportunity to read in Paradise since it deals with proper actions more than with improper ones, Aristotle establishes the different degrees of what we have come to know as sin (another reason why he reigns supreme in Reason's citadel -- had Christ only come a few centuries earlier, what a great doctor of the Church he would have made!).

The canto ends with a discussion of usury, which is important here because it prepares us to meet the usurers and understand the nature of violence against art that we'll come across in the seventh circle, and it denounces as evil anyone who perverts human industry by reaping where he has not sown (all postcolonial literature can speak to this as well, a few examples of which come readily from the Marxist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who, in Devil on the Cross and Matigari, uses the Gospel to attack those (international banking and neocolonial governments that traffic with it) who willfully abuse its principles. In Dante's time, it would have extended to the banking houses of the day and to the Jewish moneylenders, those from whom Christians sought loans because Jews did not have the same reservations about charging interest to Christians that Christians had in charging interest to one another. Were we to follow that more fully, we might find that a great deal of anti-semitism was fueled by Christian debt, but, alas, I digress, and, like Virgil, "wish now to go on: the wheel turns and Wain lies over" Kenrick.

S.