At some point during the last few months, the thought occurred to me that this business of living in quarantine during a global pandemic is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to read Boccaccio's Decameron. It was always a text I was interested in, particularly for the influence it had on Chaucer (and to go rather niche, Marguerite de Navarre), but I'd never felt drawn to it until now. My husband has several preexisting conditions which make Covid 19 more dangerous for us, and so the sense of isolation, uncertainty, loss, and - in the cases of New York and Italy, horror - feel like common experiences linking this to the past. From what I understand, Boccaccio is considered an important source for our information on what the Black Death was like, and although our current pandemic is thankfully a much less severe phenomenon than his, it's eerie to see all the parallels between what happened then and what is ongoing now. I always thought that quarantines and large-scale diseases were inherently old-fashioned things, and it just seems so bizarre to be living though one today.
Anyway, one significant theme throughout the stories in the Decameron is the question of how we grapple with the devastating consequences of sin in the church - whether institutionally in leaders or personally in laypeople. Recent years have been a challenge in this arena for me, between getting caught in the middle of an ecclesiastical disaster and witnessing the increasing polarization of Christianity in politics. I've seen hatred on both individual and corporate levels that I never realized was possible in the church, especially in the response to the current pandemic. All of that tends to get you feeling pretty hopeless about the present state of affairs, but, as you see in the late medieval church, widespread sin is nothing new for us. During the first day of Boccaccio's collection, there's a story about a Jewish businessman who converts to Christianity after visiting Rome, and his explanation for it seemed as timely as ever.
After Abraham had rested for a few days, Jehannot asked him what sort of opinion he had formed about the Holy Father and the cardinals and the other members of the papal court. Whereupon the Jew promptly replied:
'A bad one, and may God deal harshly with the whole lot of them. And my reason for telling you so is that, unless I formed the wrong impression, nobody there who was connected with the Church seemed to me to display the slightest sign of holiness, piety, charity, moral rectitude or any other virtue. On the contrary, it seemed to me that they were all so steeped in lust, greed, avarice, fraud, envy, pride, and other like sins and worse (if indeed that is possible), that I regard the place as a hotbed for diabolical rather than devotional activities. As far as I can judge, it seems to me that your pontiff, and all of the others too, are doing their level best to reduce the Christian religion to nought and drive it from the face of the earth, whereas they are the very people who should be its foundation and support.
'But since it is evident to me that their attempts are unavailing, and that your religion continues to grow in popularity, and become more splendid and illustrious, I can only conclude that, being a more holy and genuine religion than any of the others, it deservedly has the Holy Ghost as its foundation and support. So whereas earlier I stood firm and unyielding against your entreaties and refused to turn Christian, I now tell you quite plainly that nothing in the world could prevent me from becoming a Christian. Let us therefore go to the church where, in accordance with the traditional rite of your holy faith, you shall have me baptized.'
(Boccaccio, Decameron, pp. 40-41)
Thankful that God grows and nurtures the church despite its best efforts.
