Wat Does. A Period Look. Like

Paradiso Paradiso Paradiso Canto X

fourth or heaven of the Sun Spirits wise. In Praise of St. Francis

At the conclusion of the speech of St. Thomas souls abandon themselves to a dance and a song in which they express their Their concord and harmonious love with the same agreement by which the strings are moving clock, which invite the monks sounding the industriousness and meditation. Happy are the ones who like the monks close intimacy and mystical contemplation that open road to paradise! In total contrast with the spectacle of the blessed is one of those who on earth is driven by greed and compete for the conquest of worldly goods: they are clergymen, lawyers, doctors, politicians, merchants, all united in the search of idleness and the pleasures of the flesh. Argumentative therefore, the start of the song, to society antithetical to the values \u200b\u200bof which feeds the paradise. A values that Christ gave to the men and gave personal testimony of which he remained faithful to St. Francis, the saint and model of a man who knew how to find young people astray after the return to the example of Christ the answer to the problems of a society torn and divided by the arrogance and greed of the joys of consumerism.

His response was articulated in complex forms but in essence it is in these terms:

1. the race for money and economic power that gave to the merchants (and the father of Francis was a merchant) and under inclement sopraffattrice Francis opposed the ideal of poverty and not only that much or that may coincide with poverty, as that of active spiritual person's ability to reject all ties with the interests of land, with its struggles for power by this inner capacity of voluntary and suffered rejection of goods was also born as a rejection of wealth not only unessential but antithetical to moral and religious life. Poverty in this sense, Christ sets his teaching, as did St. Francis to Dante appears as the only Christian who has acted entirely like 'the teacher;
2. the daily violence of war, without blood and intolerance, he opposed the non-violence, tolerance never told his followers: be like me, but everyone is loyal to Christ in a way that is consentaneous;
3. opposed the crusade army disarmed his crusade preacher in the East goes to the Sultan that the message of Christ, that love of poverty. However, that they are seeking radically different from the personal and social man of the Middle Ages: not rich and powerful merchant, but religious poor and humble, not a man of violence but of charity, but no warrior crusader of persuasion. But there is some attitude in Francesco di Dante which is not quite the saint traditionally defined, but rather of the character that the poet has somehow "manipulated" and reduced to a more Franciscan that Dante: the saint is the poor man who talks to birds but the warrior who confronts his father, determined that celebrates the marriage of Poverty, which strongly calls to Innocent royal consent to an order based on the hardness of the rule, which goes to defy the Sultan and preach in his presence the faith of Christ, who takes refuge on a mountain top raw and want to die on the bare ground. Dante has used this incident to the basic texts of the Franciscan order, the lives of the saint, written by Thomas of Celano and St. Bonaventure. Comes from the episode the image of a holy purpose to a heroic task, which passes through the world, apparently mild, essentially at odds with the corrupt morality of his society, that ecclesiastical and civil, again invoking (and this is where the similarities with Dante) to the great ideal of Christ: poverty, tolerance, not violence.

After the eulogy of St. Francis, Thomas launched a tirade against his fellow Dominicans in the song that follows the Franciscan Bonaventure rampognerà Franciscans. The inspiration that holds the songs XI and XII is the same: Dante wants to once again argue that the source of all evil is greed and that this has infected even the great mendicant orders. To measure the magnitude of the degeneration is sufficient to note the distance between the current orders, their financial and political power with the prospects of their founders: if you want to leave the snake search of worldly goods, you must go back to Francis and Dominic, that is the authentic message of Christ. The song is moving, therefore, between the two poles of the polemic against the harsh new times, new Franciscans and Dominicans, and invite the return of men like St. Francis asserted with heroic steadfastness in poverty pre-Christian law. "The concentration of the interest of Dante receives singular light on poverty if they start finding the eleventh song of the stories a few years before Francis went frescoing, Assisi, Giotto and his assistants. This party, mind you, from the same legend of Bonaventura (hence Dante moves) but the two large frescoes in the upper basilica, one, and only marginally relates to poverty, the waiving paternal inheritance before the bishop, the others are miracles in life and in death, visions, and Francis others, episodes of real life and apostolate, etc.. It is this disparity between Dante and Giotto enables us to understand better the historical reasons of absolute preference given first to the theme of poverty, when you reflect that the basilica of Assisi was built by Brother Elias, against the teaching of the saint, reiterated in the Old Testament, which prohibited the erection of churches rich; basilica that it depended directly from the Curia, which it had all'ingente provided funding and mandate of the paintings of his trust, in particular that Giotto was a creature of it. So when Dante drew different and focuses on poverty, was in position implicit polemic with convents and the Roman Curia.