[3] The Papal chair.

[4] The grammatical construction is imperfect; the meaning is
that the change in the temper of the see of Rome is due not to
the fault of the Church itself, but to that of the Pope.

[5] Not for license to compound for unjust acquisitions by de.
voting a part of them to pious uses.

[6] "Not the tithes which belong to God's poor."

[7] The true faith; "the seed is the word of God."--Luke, viii.
11.

[8] The authority conferred on him by Innocent III.


If such was one wheel of the chariot on which the Holy Church
defended itself and vanquished in the field its civil strife,[1]
surely the excellence of the other should be very plain to thee,
concerning which Thomas before my coming was so courteous. But
the track which the highest part of its circumference made is
derelict;[2] So that the mould is where the crust was.[3] His
household, which set forth straight with their feet upon his
footprints, are so turned round that they set the forward foot on
that behind;[4] and soon the quality of the barvest of this bad
culture shall be seen, when the tare will complain that the chest
is taken from it.[5] Yet I say, he who should search our volume
leaf by leaf might still find a page where he would read, 'I am
that which I am wont:' but it will not be from Casale nor from
Acquasparta,[6] whence such come unto the Written Rule that one
flies from it, and the other contracts it.

[1] The heresies within its own borders.

[2] The track made by St. Francis is deserted.

[3] The change of metaphor is sudden; good wine makes a crust,
bad wine mould in the cask.

[4] They go in an opposite direction from that followed by the
saint.

[5] That it is taken from the chest in the granary to be burned.

[6] Frate Ubertino of Casale, the leader of a party of zealots
among the Franciscans, enforced the Rule of the Order with
excessive strictness; Matteo, of Acquasparta, general of the
Franciscans in 1257, relaxed it.

"I am the life of Bonaventura of Bagnoregio, who in great offices
always
set sinister[1] care behind me. Illuminato and Augustin are here,
who
were among the first barefoot poor that in the cord made
themselves
friends to God. Hugh of St. Victor[2] is here with them, and
Peter
Mangiadore, and Peter of Spain,[3] who down below shines in
twelve books;
Nathan the prophet, and the Metropolitan Chrysostom,[4] and
Anselm,[5] and that Donatus[6] who deigned to set his hand to the
first art; Raban[7] is here, and at my side shines the Calabrian
abbot Joachim,[8] endowed with prophetic spirit.

[1] Sinister, that is, temporal.

[2] Hugh (1097-1141), a noted schoolman, of the famous monastery
of St. Victor at Paris.

[3] Peter Mangiador, or Comestor, "the Eater," so called as being
a devourer of books. He himself wrote books famous in their time.
He was chancellor of the University at Paris, and died in 1198.
The Summae logicales of Peter of Spain, in twelve books, was long
held in high repute. He was made Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum in
1273, and was elected Pope in 1276, taking the name of John XXI.
He was killed in May, 1277, by the fall of the ceiling of the
chamber in which he was sleeping in the Papal palace at Viterbo.
He is the only Pope of recent times whom Dante meets in Paradise.

[4] The famous doctor of the Church, patriarch of Constantinople.

[5] Born about 1033 at Aosta in Piedmont, consecrated Arch.
bishop of Canterbury in 1093, died 1109; magnus et subtilis
doctor in theologia."

[6] The compiler of the treatise on grammar (the first of the
seven arts of the Trivium. and the Quadrivium), which was in use
throughout the Middle Ages.

[7] Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz, in the ninth century; a
great scholar and teacher, "cui similem suo tempore non habuit
Ecelesia."

[8] Joachim, Abbot of Flora, whose mystic prophecies had great
vogue.


"The flaming courtesy of Brother Thomas, and his discreet
discourse, moved me to celebrate[1] so great a paladin; and with


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