Life is a contest between what we want of the world and what the world wants of us. Every decision we make, every interaction we have, is in some way marked by this fundamental clash that can resolve itself in either harmony or discord, unity or chaos. Our will against the world's need, our stubbornness against the world's relentlessness... This, more than any other conflict, is the battle of existence. How can this war be managed? For it must be controlled in some way. To oppose outright is to be worn down, but to yield completely is to be subsumed. There must be a balance, found somewhere in the middle, a balance that only wisdom can strike. This is a lesson few of us learn before we pay a terrible price. Mr. Sweeney exemplifies in his concise and intriguing chronicle.
Forgotten by those not steeped in Catholic history, Pope Celestine V was an unusual creature. Known as Peter of Morrone prior to his elevation to catholicism's highest earthly seat, he was a thirteenth-century hermit who devoted his life to the contemplation of and harmony with the divine. He undertook this journey through the denial of all of life's pleasures, rejecting the comforts of hearth and home, of wife and family, even of sex and fine food. For it seemed to him that wisdom could only flow from the singular contemplation of god.
History might well have never recorded the asceticism of Peter of Morrone. For this was an age of poor record-keeping. In fact, much of his life remains shadowed in mystery and hearsay. However, it is known that, at a time of profound moral crisis for the catholic church, a movement began from within the faith to elevate to the papacy a man who would put morality above political reality, a man of such goodness that he would battle corruption instead of accede to it. It did not take long for Peter of Morrone's name to be put forward for such a post. And, with his candidacy backed by a powerful king, who saw in peter a man he could manipulate, Peter of Morrone was made Celestine V, for a little while at least. For no sooner had the new pope understood the task he'd accepted, the poisons and temptations that surrounded him, then he rejected them, sensationally quitting the papacy to return to the life of a solitary seeker and leaving catholicism to lurch forward into the dark centuries to follow.
The Pope Who Quit is an entertaining examination of a most peculiar event. There are few souls who possess the fortitude and the humility to accept, and the courage to reject, nearly absolute power. And so, when we encounter one such, there is cause to pause our journey for a time and consider him, understand him, and weigh the truths for which he stood. Mr. Sweeney expeditiously assembles the facts about Peter of Morrone that have survived the centuries, painting a portrait of a man whose goodness was unquestioned but whose talents were unsuited to the hornet's nest of temporal politics into which he was plunged. He was a stoic, a man who rejected the here and now for the otherworldly eternal, a fact which doomed his stint as pope before it even began.
Mr. Sweeney concerns himself, here, with the question of whether or Celestine V was wise or foolish, whether he left his post because he fully understood his unsuitableness or if he was brushed aside by a profane world that had realized his thoughts were far too much of the sacred to be practical. To me, this is not the most pertinent question raised by a consideration of Peter of Morrone. Rather, he ought to ask us to contemplate just how much a man can live in a world of the now when his heart and mind are set on what's next. Can someone who has more care for god than for himself truly ever understand the world into which he's been born? Surely, it holds as many mysteries as god does. And if those mysteries are not studied, grappled with, then how can one ever successfully live with others?
There can be no doubt that, today, Peter of Morrone would be an antisocial misfit, a man whose contemplation of the divine came at the cost of denying to a needful world the light of his goodness. And if that is not an act of supreme selfishness, I cannot imagine what is. It is fine to be selfish in this way; we are all free to act as we choose. But to attempt to festoon it with the trappings of morality seems, at the very least, dubious.
A solid chronicle of an interesting man and an even more interesting time... (3/5 Stars)
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