Commentary Par XXIV 124-126

Here is a part of Carroll's comment (DDP Carroll.Par.XXIV.115-138): 'That is, Peter sees now the risen body of Christ, concerning which he had only faith as he ran to the sepulchre; but even faith made him conquer the younger feet of John, who at the time had no faith in the Resurrection.  The difficulty is that it was John who outran Peter and came first to the sepulchre.  It is not in the least likely that Dante forgot this.  His meaning undoubtedly is that while the younger feet, through lack of faith, lingered at the entrance, Peter's faith carried him past his doubting companion to the inside.  (In Mon.III.ix.16, however, the incident is given as an instance of Peter's impulsiveness rather than his faith: "John says that he went in immediately when he came to the tomb, seeing the other disciple lingering at the entrance."  Perhaps Dante wished to retract his former judgment.)  This does no injustice to John, since he himself says it was only after he entered and saw how the grave-clothes were folded up, that he believed (John 20:5-8).  It is somewhat strange, however, that Dante should choose this incident as an example of Peter's faith.'

Is this more than a slight dig in the ribs for Peter?  See C.Par.XXIV.22, C.Par.XXIV.39, C.Par.XXIV.52-57, C.Par.XXIV.62-63, and C.Par.XXIV.108.  The reader would do well to turn immediately to the text of the Monarchia (Mon.III.ix.1-19), a diatribe against Peter as a stand-in for the papacy.  Discussing the context of the passage in Luke 22:38, which was among the biblical texts that the hierocrats employed to assert papal authority over the emperor, Dante has this to say about Peter's intellectual capacity: 'Peter, as was his habit, answered unreflectingly, only considering the surface of things' (Mon.III.ix.2); later (Mon.III.ix.8) he adds that, had Peter actually said what the hierocrats claimed he did, Christ would have reproached him for that remark about the two swords 'as He did reproach him many times, when he replied not knowing what he was saying.'  Dante continues in a similar vein (Mon.III.ix.9): 'And that Peter was in the habit of speaking without reflecting is proved by his hasty and unthinking impulsiveness, which came not just from the sincerity of his faith, but, I think, from his simple and ingenuous nature.'  Finally, having listed a whole series of Peter's inadequacies, both as thinker and as loyal follower of Jesus, Dante moves toward his conclusion: 'It is helpful to have listed these episodes involving our Archimandrite in praise of his ingenuousness, for they show quite clearly that when he spoke of the two swords he was answering Christ with no deeper meaning in mind' (all these translations are from P. Shaw's edition).  According to Carroll, this passage may serve as a partial retraction of those views.  The reader has, nonetheless, to wonder why Dante should, if more circumspectly than in the anti-Petrine diatribe in Monarchia, be chipping away at the veneer of authority lodged in the man whom he considered the first pope.  Is it possible that his widely represented distrust of particular popes prompts him to protest any emerging sense that a pontiff, because of his tenure in the highest ecclesiastical office, is necessarily without doctrinal error?  See Bennassuti's unintentionally amusing insistence (DDP Bennassuti.Inf.XI.8) that Dante could not have condemned Pope Anastasius II as a heretic because the poet believed in papal infallibility (Bennassuti, as a priest, should have known better, since this did not become a doctrine of the Church until his own nineteenth century); as a result the reader is to understand that demons put that inscription on the tomb for Dante to read.  This is perhaps one of the most extravagant misreadings of the text of the poem and of Dante's intentions in a commentary tradition that is not deprived of amusingly wrongheaded insistence on what Dante supposedly would never do.