Discovering The New World: The Papacy’s Backing Of Dante And Columbus
A concerning trend has broken out in the world: that of rewriting history to one's liking by acclaiming or tarnishing historical figures of whom very little is actually known. For more than 30 years, the journalist, poet and writer Ruggero Marino has studied the figure of the navigator Christopher Columbus. Contrary to popular belief, the life of the man who discovered the New World is an enigma. After decades of research a truth has emerged: the contribution of the Church to the enterprise of Columbus. In the past, numerous scholars have contested, but then accepted this theses, proof in hand, proposed by Marino. In his book Dante, Colombo e la fine del mondo, he shines new light on the clues sown along the history of a continent whose memory was lost.
John of Patmos watches the descent of New Jerusalem from God in a 14th-century tapestry ( Octave 444 /CC BY-SA 4.0)
Utopians In Search Of Paradise
Marino studied the similarities between Dante Alighieri and Christopher Columbus. Both were utopians, looking for a better world; Dante through literature, Columbus with his discoveries, in search of Paradise. Dante's is a "Divine Paradise”, Columbus' is a "Earthly Paradise”, the one of the Bible, which was at the time considered a true text and the real history of humanity. To the men of the Middle Ages - whom Columbus would lead to the Renaissance of civilization - everything had to correspond to the Holy Scriptures, which lay every foundation of the secular world and the Divinity. The Earthly Paradise was sought, since at the time people believed in the existence of correspondences between the "heavenly” and the “earthly” city of Jerusalem, which on some maps was marked the navel of the world. Dante’s mysticism resurfaces in the inspiration of Columbus. For both, the monk Joachim of Fiore "with a gifted prophetic spirit”, as Dante writes, was the source of their spiritual convictions and his influence is clear in the expressions of Columbus and the verses of Dante.
