THE BLOOD OF THE APOSTLES: DANTE, THE FRANCISCANS AND POPE JOHN XXII

Abstract

During the early years of his pontificate Pope John XXII (1316–34) began actively to suppress the radical elements within the Franciscan Order: the Spirituals and their followers among the laity. He also instigated an inquiry into the apocalyptic doctrines of the Spiritual master, Petrus Johannis Olivi (d. 1298), and initiated a process of re-examining the whole question of Franciscan poverty. This process was eventually to culminate in the bull, Cum inter nonnullos (12 November 1323), in which he condemned as ‘erroneous and heretical’ the Franciscan assertions that Christ and the apostles possessed nothing, either individually or in common, and that they had no right of using or disposing of property. During part of this same period, from about 1317 until the year of his death (1321), Dante was probably working on the later cantos of the Paradiso. It is in these later cantos, as most modern commentators agree, that John XXII is obliquely but recognizably represented as an enemy to the apostolic ideal: first in Par., XVIII. 130–36 and secondly, and rather more explicitly, in Par., XXVII. 58–59.