I was wondering…
We are reading Dante’s Inferno in my English class and I was wondering how his stuff aligns and possibly contradicts Catholic beliefs. I really love the book, but this much I would like to know. Yay Malebolge! Thoughts, opinions, criticism, and whatever are wanted very much.
He was as Catholic as they come. 
There is a MS. of the Comedy from which a line in Inferno 11 has been cut out - seemingly because the poet, mislead by the Liber Pontificalis, puts Anastasius II in Hell - but that seems to be the sum total of fault-finding on doctrinal grounds where the
Comedy is concerned. The
De Monarchia is the only one of his works to which Church authority took exception - which is remarkable, since his political theory in the
Comedy is the same as in the
De Monarchia.
He may well have regarded Boniface VIII as an intruder, but he did not reject the claims of Clement V, the next but one successor of Boniface VIII. If the poet regarded Celestine V as Pope, & Boniface VIII as an intruder, but his successor as legitimate, that would leave a nine-year gap between 1294 & 1303. Which would mean that the Papacy was for all practical purposes vacant for that period. It had earlier been vacant for lack of any election for 31 months between 1268 and 1271 - so a nine-year vacancy between Popes is not really a stretch. The poet was not a sedevacantist, in the modern sense.
I’m assuming that he regarded Boniface VIII as no Pope in any sense whatever - however, the denunciation in Paradiso 27 may not mean that; it could mean that Boniface VIII was legally, but not morally, Pope. IOW, the Papacy might be vacant in one sense - but not vacant, in another. There is is the explicit description of this Pope as “Christ’s Vicar”, in those lines of the Purgatorio where the poet describes the Pope’s arrest at Anagni. He says that the Passion of Christ was renewed in the indignities to which Boniface VIII was subjected: which is not the language of a sedevacantist.
This interpretation of his words, if correct, is evidence not of confusion or contradiction on his part, but of an ability to see things under more than a single aspect.
- St. Robert Bellarmine made a point of defending the poet’s orthodoxy against a Lutheran attempt to claim him as a forerunner of the Reformation
- Cardinal Manning - not the Australian one; the English one - said of the Comedy that “after [that], nothing remain[ed] but the Vision of God”.
- Pius IX was about as anti-anti-Catholic as it’s possible to get, and he laid a wreath on the poet’s tomb in 1857; after the writing of a book which claimed the poet was a heretic, revolutionary, & Socialist.
- Benedict XV wrote a letter to mark the sixth centenary of the poet’s death in 1921
- Paul VI did likewise in 1965, to mark the seventh centenary of the poet’s birth.
The history of his poem, of his mortal remains, of the appreciation of his poem by Catholics, leave no shadow of doubt as to his Catholicity: in every sense.
There is no way whatever of appreciating the
Comedy as a whole, if all one reads is the Inferno.
Nothing in it even approaches the highest flights in the Paradiso (which is saying a lot); let alone the Vision with which the poem ends, for which the 14,000 or so preceding lines are a preparation; if the Bible is inspired, far more is the end of the Paradiso. The Inferno is not free-standing, but part of a larger whole.
I think it’s a very useful exercise to ask oneself what there is in the self, and in society, that is infernal, & needs purging. That is why he wrote the poem: as an allegory of the self, and of society. As he explains in his eleventh letter
