The Pope in Hell — Divine Comedy

Sacred office sold for gold ends with your feet on fire. This is the Inferno's sharpest political sermon, and Dante's most direct use of his own voice. In the third ditch simoniacs are buried head-down in stone holes; Dante compares them to the baptismal fonts at San Giovanni, one of which he once broke to save a drowning child. The soles burn; the legs kick. Virgil carries him down to the hole burning hardest. The spirit shouts: Boniface, already? He has been expecting Pope Boniface VIII, still alive above, and mistakes Dante for him. Dante denies it. The spirit then names himself: Nicholas III, an Orsini, a she-bear's son who crammed his gains into his purse above and drove himself here. His predecessors lie deeper. When Boniface finally arrives he will sink; after Boniface, one uglier still from the west, Clement V, a new Jason, who bought his priesthood the way Jason of Maccabees bought his. Dante answers with a sermon: Peter asked only 'Follow me' and took nothing; Matthias took no silver at the casting of lots. Avarice has made your god of gold. The sharpest line lands on Constantine: not his conversion but the Donation, the wealth he gave the first rich Father, is where the corruption of the Church began. Nicholas spins on his soles, whether from wrath or conscience Dante cannot tell. Virgil, pleased at the true words spoken, lifts Dante in both arms and carries him back to the ridge of the fifth pier. Dante spoke truth to a corrupt pope and his guide approved; that is the cost and the reward of saying what needed to be said.