The purpose of this brief article is to show cause why the traditional identification of Pope Celestine V with “him who made through cowardice the great refusal” (Inf. iii, 60) should be abandoned, and Dante’s memory cleared from an act of impiety.

The identification has no authority. It has, apparently, been repeated by commentators without any investigation, the only reason being Dante’s well-known hostility, on political grounds, to Boniface VIII, and the fact that Celestine’s abdication gave Benedetto Gaetano his opportunity.

Dante himself gives us no clue whatsoever. In its absence we can only fall back upon probability. And probability is entirely against it. There is only one certain allusion to Boniface’s predecessor in the whole of his writings. It occurs in the remarkable story told by Count Guido da Montefeltro in Malebolge (Inf. xxvii, 105). Guido had counselled the taking of Penestrino by deceit on the strength of Boniface’s promise to absolve him from it. “Heaven,” said the Pope, “can I both lock and unlock, as you know ; for twain are the keys, which my predecessor held not dear (non ebbe care).” This is Dante’s only allusion to the hermit pope, and it has not a trace of anger or contempt. It was in an uncritical age, too,—an age which preferred Petrarch to Dante—that Alban Butler wrote the extraordinary footnote to his account of St. Peter Celestine (May 19). Petrarch himself, who in his De Vita Solitaria extols the saint as “a soul very perfect and free,” and rebuts the charge of vilitas animi which he supposes Dante to have made against him, confesses that he had not taken much notice of the Commedia.