Ius & Iustitium is happy to present this guest post by Aníbal Sabater. Aníbal Sabater is a lawyer in New York City specialized in international arbitration. This essay is the first of a planned three pieces on lawyers in the Divina Commedia. Essays on lawyers in Purgatorio and Paradiso are expected to follow in a few weeks. If a discussion of Dante is always timely, it is more so this year, which marks the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death and has seen the publication of Pope Francis’s Candor Lucis Aeterna (March 25, 2021), a lucid analysis of Dante and his work.
That legal talent does not guarantee a place in Dante’s Paradiso is well attested by Judge Ugolino Visconti, whom friends called “Nino.” [1] Around 1290, Judge Nino arrested and sentenced to death a certain Fratre Gomita, chancellor of Gallura in Sicily and brazen barrator according to local contemporary chroniclers, who described him as “molto malizioso e grande trebalderi per danari” (“very wicked and a great purloiner for money”).[2] Dante was probably aligned with popular sentiment when he praised Judge Nino for his decency,[3] while counting Gomita among the fraudsters in the eighth circle of the Inferno.[4] But a rigorous Thomist for the most part, Dante knew that, upon death, the Judge was not quite ready for Paradiso. Lawyers are called to pursue truth, justice, and the common good, with singular unity of life. A person lacking in personal virtue can make a good blacksmith, but not a good lawyer, because ultimately, the lawyer offers, or should offer, himself for others in ways that the blacksmith cannot. Eventually, we find Judge Nino in Purgatorio, because despite his success as Sicily’s anti-corruption czar, he had been so absorbed by local politics that he neglected both his spiritual life and the care of his wife. In a poignant scene in Purgatorio’s Eighth Canto, Judge Nino longs for the prayers of his infant daughter Giovanna, the only person on earth who still seems to miss him, and goes on a proud diatribe against his widow, who was too quick to remarry. [5]
Despite the expected length of his term in Purgatorio, Nino could have fared much worse, as shown by the two professionally acclaimed lawyers whom Dante destines to the Inferno. The first is his own close friend Francesco Accursio. The son of Accursio de Bagnolo, Francesco had continued his father’s monumental organization of the glosses to Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis. The glosses allowed Roman law to be understood in Europe and inspire both canonical and civil reforms and legislation. Like his father, Francesco was also accomplished in private practice and a much sought after professor (his students would not let him leave Florence for a position with the emperor). In fact, it is hard to think of a contemporaneous lawyer towards whom Dante could have been more sympathetic than Francesco—a grandiose spirit, steeped in the classics, and determined that positive law should remain a just ordinance of reason. Yet, on account of his profligacy, Dante placed Francesco with the violent in the seventh circle of the Inferno.[6]
The second is the most distinguished canon lawyer of his time, Benedetto Caetani, who reigned as Pope Boniface VIII, from 1294 to 1303. As integralists worth their salt know, Boniface issued in 1302 the Bull Unam Sanctam, in which he confirmed the existence of two powers (or swords), the secular and the temporal. “Both”—the bull famously says—“are in the power of the Church, that is to say, the spiritual and the material sword, but the former is to be administered for the Church [while] the latter by the Church; the former in the hands of the priest; the latter in the hands of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.”[7]
Modernist commentators see Dante as a forerunner of the secular state and a proponent of its strict separation from the Church. For them, Boniface is in the Inferno on account of his supposedly faulty theology, which encroached upon the temporal and denied the independence of the emperor. This analysis, however, is simplistic and does not take Dante at his word. Leaving aside the chronological complexities that stem from the fact that Boniface had not yet issued Unam Sanctam and is not actually (but only expected) in Hell when Dante visits there (March 1300), Dante was less at odds with Boniface over theology than modern exegesis lets on. To be sure, Boniface and his allies were Dante’s arch-nemeses in real life, and White Guelph until the end, Dante was always very hostile to the theory of the two swords in general and the involvement of the Pope in Italian politics in particular. Dante’s De Monarchia makes no bones about his views on this issue, which depart significantly not only from Unam Sanctam but from mainstream Thomistic thought. But Dante never disavowed divine law, natural law, or the state’s subjection to both. As Saint Paul VI declared (alas not magisterially), rather than asserting the independence of the Empire from the Church, Dante emphasized the need for both to be coordinated as a necessary requirement for the common good:
“The peace of individuals, families, nations and the human community, this peace internal and external, private and public, this tranquility of order is disturbed and shaken because piety and justice are being trampled upon. To restore order and salvation, faith and reason, Beatrice and Virgil, the Cross and the Eagle, Church and Empire are called [by Dante] to operate in harmony.”[8]
Ultimately, whatever concerns Dante may have had over Unam Sanctam, those were not dispositive of Boniface’s eternal punishment in the Commedia. Dante was too sincere a poet to not place Boniface among the heretics, just as he did with Pope Anastasius II, if he thought heresy was Boniface’s dominant sin. Instead, what Dante found most troubling in Boniface was his worldliness. Specifically, Dante seems to have believed that while still a cardinal, Boniface pressured Celestinus V into resignation, so as to clear the road to the Papacy for himself. Dante also took at face value heavily contested reports that from his times as a lawyer in the curia, Boniface had abused his powers and behaved with duplicity.[9] It is on those charges that Dante places Boniface and his entourage in the rim of the third pitch of the Eighth Circle of Hell, reserved for the simonists (a sin that in Dante’s gradation of circles appears graver than heresy, perhaps because Dante deemed it more scandalous to misuse the Church than to leave it altogether).[10]
Not all the lawyers in Inferno, however, are guilty of vanity or sensuality. Averroes and Virgil receive as virtuous pagans the compliment of dwelling in the First Circle of the Inferno,[11] which we would call Limbo today, a place of solace from which unbaptized souls are occasionally taken to Paradiso. Neither Averroes nor Virgil, however, were lawyers on a “full time basis,” to borrow an expression that would have caused Dante the polymath to cringe. Averroes was Cordoba’s chief justice, but also a noted physician and philosopher, while Virgil is said to have quit the practice of law immediately after arguing his first case.
It is telling that the two most highly regarded lawyers in Inferno subordinated the practice of law to higher endeavors. Like the scholastics from his time, Dante knew that jurisprudence is a subaltern science, that is, a science ultimately deriving its principles from other sciences and ordained to a good distinct from and above itself. The world is prone to forget that distinction, but Averroes and Virgil did not. Nor did the lawyers in Purgatorio or Paradiso—but that is a story for another day.
—Aníbal Sabater
- The SCOTUS enthusiast may find some irony—if not an unwitting prophecy—in Judge Visconti’s nickname. ↑
- This is the first of three pieces on lawyers in the Commedia. Lawyers in Purgatorio and in Paradiso are expected to follow in a few weeks. Unless otherwise noted, translations are the author’s. ↑
- Pur. VIII, 53. ↑
- Inf. XXII, 81-87. ↑
- Pur. VIII, 67-81. ↑
- Inf. XV, 110. ↑
- Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam (November 18, 1302), par. 3. The English translation here is taken from https://www.papalencyclicals.net/bon08/b8unam.htm. ↑
- Saint Paul VI, Altissimi Cantus, December 7, 1965. Altissimi Cantus is available online in Latin and Italian at www.vatican.va. The English translation here is taken from a quote of Altissimi in the English version of Pope Francis’ Candor Lucis Aeterna (March 25, 2021, Section 1), also available at www.vatican.va. ↑
- Dante’s criticism of Boniface is not universally accepted. See, for instance, the entry on Boniface VIII in the Catholic Encyclopedia: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02662a.htm. ↑
- Inf. XIX, 52-78. ↑
- Inf. IV, 52 and 144. ↑
