A Tale of Two Lovers: A Renaissance Humanist Before He Became Pope

 

A Tale of Two Lovers by Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini is an unusual tale both for its content and because the author would later become Pope Pius II. Written in 1444 while Piccolomini was a diplomat and Renaissance humanist, the novella became one of the most popular love stories of the fifteenth century. After his election as pope in 1458, however, he distanced himself from the work.

The story belongs to the long tradition of medieval and Renaissance courtly romance that stretches from Chrétien de Troyes to the literature eventually satirized by Cervantes in Don Quixote. Yet Piccolomini's lovers are more human than the idealized knights and ladies of earlier romances. They are driven not simply by chivalric devotion but by genuine physical desire.

What surprised me most was the novella's frank celebration of physical love. The lovers meet only twice, yet on both occasions they delight in one another passionately and immediately long for another meeting. Piccolomini presents their intimacy not as temptation but as an essential expression of their love. For a work written in the middle of the fifteenth century, the openness with which he portrays mutual physical affection feels remarkably modern. The story is, for much of its length, unabashedly in love with physical love itself.

In the end, however, the novella returns to convention. The lovers cannot escape the moral and social order surrounding them. The heroine dies in despair, while the knight ultimately marries a worthy bride, restoring the expected balance of virtue and duty. The conclusion is obligatory. The author recognized that his celebration of passion required a moral resolution acceptable to his audience.

A Tale of Two Lovers is not a great work of Renaissance literature, but it is a fascinating one. It stands between medieval romance and Renaissance humanism, revealing a writer more interested in the psychology of love than in the conventions of chivalry. Read today, it is made even more intriguing by the knowledge that its worldly, perceptive author would later become the head of the Roman Catholic Church. That remarkable transformation gives the novella an historical irony almost as memorable as the story itself.

Henry Kissenger and The Nazi Pope: Long Lives Addicted to Power

Two terrible twins in my mind and probably no one else's are Henry Kissenger and Pope Pius XII, the pope who bowed to the Nazis to preserve the Vatican and ignored the pleas of Catholics in France, England, Poland and other countries. He also never said the word Jew or acknowledged The Holocaust during World War II. The Pope's wretched performance in World War II is well documented in The Pope at War by David I. Kertzer. 

Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII, chose preservation of The Vatican over preservation of Catholic lives.  

In 1957, Henry Kissenger wrote his best book, A World Restored--arguably the book that defined his life's work.  In that book Kissenger wrote about the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 and how it restored stability to Europe.  Kissenger decided stability was the proper goal of diplomacy. No moral considerations could stand in the way of stability: the same reasoning that Pius XII used to put the preservation of The Vatican over the lives of Catholics and Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe.

Kissenger was in his mid-30s when Pius XII died in 1958 at 82 years old.  Kissenger lived longer, reaching 100 years, but both men clung to power and relevance until their last breath.  

After his pro-Nazi war years, Pius XII conspired with surviving Nazis by supporting the "Rat Line" that got Nazis and their looted wealth out of Europe to South America after World War II.  

Kissenger in his preference for stability opened relations with China and brought great prosperity to the communist nation, assuming that the world would benefit by bringing China into the world economy.  Fifty years later, China has the second largest economy in the world and is using it to build it its Navy and Army and threaten its neighbors, most notably Taiwan.  Building up a totalitarian country leads to a more powerful totalitarian country. 

Kissenger's path to the Vietnam peace deal includes abandoning our allies and giving consent to dropping more bombs on Cambodia and Laos than America dropped on Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II. 

In his 90s, Kissenger still craved relevance. He insinuated himself into the Trump administration through Jared Kushner--giving credibility to the biggest abuser of power for personal wealth ever to work in the White House. Kushner's Saudi Sovereign Wealth deal may exceed Trump himself in abuse of power.  

Both men chose power over every moral consideration. Both strove for relevance until their dying breath. Each made the world a better place by breathing no more.