After the fire had somewhat roared according to its fashion, the sharp point moved this way and that, and then gave forth this breath: “If I could believe that my answer might be to a person who should ever return unto the world, this flame would stand without more quiverings; but inasmuch as, if I hear truth, never from this depth did any living man return, without fear of infamy I answer thee.
“I was a man of arms, and then became a cordelier, trusting, thus girt, to make amends; and surely my trust had been fulfilled but for the Great Priest,[1] whom may ill betide! who set me back into my first sins; and how and wherefore, I will that thou hear from me. While I was that form of bone and flesh that my mother gave me, my works were not leonine, but of the fox. The wily practices, and the covert ways, I knew them all, and I so plied their art that to the earth’s end the sound went forth. When I saw me arrived at that part of my age where every one ought to strike the sails and to coil up the ropes, what erst was pleasing to me then gave me pain, and I yielded me repentant and confessed. Alas me wretched! and it would have availed. The Prince of the new Pharisees having war near the Lateran,[2]—and not with Saracens nor with Jews, for every enemy of his was Christian, and none of them had been to conquer Acre,[3] nor a trafficker in the land of the Soldan,—regarded in himself neither his supreme office, nor the holy orders, nor in me that cord which is wont to make those girt with it more lean; but as Constantine besought Sylvester within Soracte to cure his leprosy,[4] so this one besought me as master to cure his proud fever. He asked counsel of me, and I kept silence, because his words seemed drunken. And then he said to me, ‘Let not thy heart mistrust; from now I absolve thee, and do thou teach me to act so that I may throw Palestrina to the ground. Heaven can I lock and unlock, as thou knowest; for two are the keys that my predecessor held not dear.’ Then his grave arguments pushed me to where silence seemed to me the worst, and I said, ‘Father, since thou washest me of that sin wherein I now must fall, long promise with short keeping will make thee triumph on the High Seat.’ Francis[5] came for me afterwards, when I was dead, but one of the Black Cherubim said to him, ‘Bear him not away; do me not wrong; he must come down among my drudges because he gave the fraudulent counsel, since which till now I have been at his hair; for he who repents not cannot be absolved, nor can repentance and will exist together, because of the contradiction that allows it not.’ O woeful me! how I shuddered when he took me, saying to me, ‘Perhaps thou didst not think that I was a logician.’ To Minos he bore me; and he twined his tail eight times round his hard back, and, after he had bitten it in great rage, he said, ‘This is one of the sinners of the thievish fire.’ Therefore I, where thou seest, am lost, and going thus robed I rankle.” When he had thus completed his speech the flame, sorrowing, departed, twisting and flapping its sharp horn.
[1] Boniface VIII.
[2] With the Colonna family, whose stronghold was Palestrina.
[3] Not one had been a renegade, to help the Saracens at the siege of Acre in 1291.
[4] It was for this service that Constantine was supposed to have made Sylvester “the first rich Father.” See Canto xiv. His predecessor, Celestine V., had renounced the papacy.
[5] St. Francis came for his soul, as that of one of the brethren of his Order.
We passed onward, I and my Leader, along the crag, far as upon the next arch that covers the ditch in which the fee is paid by those who, sowing discord, win their burden.
CANTO XXVIII.
Eighth Circle: ninth pit: sowers of discord and schism.—Mahomet and Ali.—Fra Dolcino.—Pier da Medicina.—Curio.—Mosca.—Bertrau de Born.