The Society of God and Man

        Dante was a man who wrote brilliant works of poetry in the early 1300’s.  In his most famous work, The Divine Comedy, he strongly criticizes the Church and its leaders.  He believed that the Church had strayed far from the teachings of Jesus; Jesus spoke of how wealth wasn’t important on Earth, and yet Dante portrays many Popes and leaders in Hell who have done just that.  Pope BonifaceVIII is one of the people in power that Dante especially took a lot of anger out on in his Divine Comedy, stemming from both personal and philosophical reasons.  He writes in many of his Cantos accusations towards the evils that he believed Boniface did during his life; Boniface wasn’t even dead when this journey was supposedly taking place.  Since the beginning of his papacy, Boniface was accused of fornication and sodomy with specific partners, blasphemy, and many other vices.  The most persistent accusations against Boniface are those of blasphemy and heretical beliefs: that he denied the resurrection; that he disparaged the Eucharist as "no more Christ's body than I am," "it's only dough”, and Christ's mother, "no more a virgin than my mother was."  Clearly Dante is trying to show people that the current Church of Rome is corrupt.  

A pope is included among the first souls Dante sees in Hell, because he rejected the task God set for him, but probably also because his abdication left the way open for Boniface.  In greed, all the condemned souls Dante notices are clerics, among them popes and cardinals, their greed set in direct opposition to God's will as manifest by Fortune, who disposes wealth and power according to a divine plan.  Dante takes an extreme stand against the wealth and power of the church; it had tried to push its power too far and had therefore reduced itself to a prisoner of one ruler and destroyed its influence to do any good.  The only way to rebuild the greatness of the Church was to strip it of all its wealth and power, only then could it recover.  In the Comedy, even more forcefully than in the Monarchy, Dante argues for the empire as the ultimate world government, and for the Church as the ultimate spiritual force.  But to be such a force, the church must destroy the monster it has become and return to the purity of its origins.

Augustine also had far different views on what he considered good and evil.  He blamed the sack of Rome on the beliefs on the Roman people.  His whole dissertation in twenty-two books in The City of God speaks of the religion and his views on what he interprets from God.  The "City of God" consists of those who will enjoy eternal happiness with God in heaven, the "City of Man" of those who will not. The city of God is not identical with the Church, since not all members of the Church will be saved.  Book I is a list and an explanation on why Rome fell to the Goths: how the belief in many gods, blame of the Christians for the sack of Rome, and honorable suicide are some of the many reasons he attributes the fall of the Rome on the early Romans.  Augustine states that the Romans indifference towards other religions, namely the sacredness of temples, was another reason that the Roman Empire failed; Roman soldiers would attack religious temples with people inside them, not caring whether it was regarded as a safe-house or not.  Even the barbarian army that sacked the city he attributed to Christianity, saying that even though they held no Christian beliefs, they were led by Christ. “This is to be attributed to the name of Christ and the influence of Christianity. Anyone who fails to see this is blind; anyone who sees it and fails to give praise for it is thankless; anyone who tries to stop another from giving praise is a madman.”  He presses his position so hard that it’s almost an order, not a belief.  But many of Augustine’s positions went against the teachings of Jesus; Augustine rejected pacificism, which to some seemed to be implied by Jesus words about not resisting evil and turning the other cheek.

        It is clear that all three of these great minds differed greatly on what they perceived to be right or wrong, good or bad, strong and weak.  Dante believed the Church of Rome to be corrupt, while Augustine believed it to be the only power that could actually accomplish anything.  All three believed that the Church needed to be reformed in some ways, some more strongly than others.  There surely was corruption among the leaders of the Church, as there always will be in people who are placed in a position of power.  A voice spoken at the right time has been known to influence countries into wars; Dante, Augustine and Machiavelli were the voices of the time and brought great change to the structure of the Church.