Why did Pius X fail in his stated goal of defeating the modernist infiltration of the Church? First, because he was himself a modernist, perpetuating the permission for profit on loans and doing absolutely nothing to restore the immemorial dogma forbidding usury. (“Not to oppose erroneous doctrine is to approve of it.” Pope Innocent III). Second, because the “holy popes” of the supposed “reaction” (Leo XIII, Pius IX and Pius X), left untouched and intact the Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalist conspiracy inside the Church.
Clark Trinkaus: “…the underlying vision of reality in the modern age…originates with Renaissance Hermetism, that is the insights based on the Ancient Philosophy (Prisca theologia) introduced into European philosophy and theology by Marsilio Ficino in his Heavenly Gathered Life (De vita coelestus comparata) and by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his Oration on Human Dignity (Oratio de dignitate hominis)…”
Tutoring Giovanni Pico in Medici Florence was his preceptor, Rev. Fr. Ficino: “Though Pico used the method of mystical reduction for a more radical purpose than Ficino, there can be little doubt that he had it from his teacher. To understand a classical author ‘deeply,’ Ficino would always turn to a Hellenistic commentary. Even Plato, to whose translation and exposition the major part of his life was devoted, he read with the eyes of Plotinus, in whom he discovered ‘an inspiration no less noble but occasionally more profound…His commentary on Plato’s Symposium was largely derived, as he himself admitted, from the sixth book of the first Ennead; and in preparing his readers for the study of Plotinus he paraphrased the relation of this profounder Platonist to Plato by alluding to the descent of the Holy Ghost during the baptism of Christ (Luke 3:22): ‘And you may think that Plato himself spoke thus to Plotinus: ‘Thou art my beloved son; in thee I am well pleased.’ To make Plato appear as God the Father giving his blessing to Plotinus as God the Son is to remove Plato to the inhuman heights of the Almighty, from which Plotinus descends as a philosophical redeemer, a Christ of the Platonic mysteries. That Ficino sensed no blasphemy in the metaphor shows to what extent Christian and Platonic sources of revelation were regarded as concordant and interchangeable.” 12
Pope Paul III “appointed Michelangelo chief architect, sculptor and painter at the Vatican. The instrument is dated September 1, 1535, and the terms with which it describes the master’s eminence in the three arts are highly flattering. Allusion is directly made to the fresco of the Last Judgment, which may therefore have begun about this date. Michelangelo was enrolled as a member of the Pontifical household with a permanent pension of 1200 golden crowns…” 13
After the three hundred ninety figures of “The Last Judgment” were painted, Biagio da Cesena recoiled from it in horror, denouncing it as “disgraceful that in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully.” Cesena added that the fresco was more appropriate “for the public baths and taverns,” than the pope’s chapel. Upon learning of Cesena remarks, the vengeful Michelangelo altered the “The Last Judgment” to add figure 391: Cesena himself. Michelangelo placed him in hell and painted him pornographically: with the ears of a donkey and with a snake holding the tip of Cesena’s penis in its mouth. According to a contemporary, Ludovico Domenichi, when Cesna protested this pornographic slander to the Pope, Paul III lamely replied that his “jurisdiction does not extend to hell,” and that the portrait would remain on the wall of the Sistine Chapel before which the Mass was offered.
The other notable contemporary jeremiad raised in protest of Michelangelo’s nude “Christianity” in the Sistine Chapel, was put forth by the Venetian poet Pietro Aretino (1492-1557), whose character has been impugned by Michelangelo’s defenders. 14
Whatever the serious flaws in his own poetic expression however (and there were many), Aretino’s observations in his letter to Michelangelo 15 were in fidelity with a thousand years of pre-Renaissance, Bible-centered Catholicism:
“To the Great Michelangelo Buonarroti in Rome
“Sir, When I inspected the complete sketch of the whole of your Last Judgment, I arrived at recognizing the eminent graciousness of Raffaello 16 in its agreeable beauty of invention. Meanwhile, as a baptized Christian, I blush before the license, so forbidden to man’s intellect, which you have used in expressing ideas connected with the highest aims and final ends to which our faith aspires. So, then, that Michelangelo stupendous in his fame, that Michelangelo renowned for prudence, that Michelangelo whom all admire, has chosen to display to the whole world an impiety of irreligion only equalled by the perfection of his painting!
“Is it possible that you, who, since you are divine, do not condescend to consort with human beings, have done this in the greatest temple built to God, upon the highest altar raised to Christ, in the most sacred chapel upon the earth, where the mighty hinges of the Church, the venerable priests of our religion, the Vicar of Christ, with solemn ceremonies and holy prayers, confess, contemplate and adore his body, his blood, and his flesh?
“If it were not infamous to introduce the comparison, I would plume myself upon my discretion when I wrote La Nanna. I would demonstrate the superiority of my prudent reserve to your immodesty, seeing that I, while handling themes lascivious and immodest, use language comely and decorous, speak in terms beyond reproach and inoffensive to chaste ears. You, on the contrary, presenting so awful a subject, exhibit saints and angels, these without earthly decency, and those without celestial honors.
“The pagans when they made statues I not say of Diana who is clothed, but of naked Venus, made them cover with their hand the parts which should not be seen. And here there comes a Christian who, because he rates art higher than faith, deems a royal spectacle martyrs and virgins in improper attitudes, men dragged down by their genitals, things in front of which brothels would shut their eyes in order not to see them. Your art would be at home in some voluptuous bathhouse, certainly not in the highest chapel of the world.
“Less criminal were it if you were an infidel, than, being a believer, thus to sap the faith of others. Up to the present time the splendor of such audacious marvels has not gone unpunished; for their very excellence is the death of your good name. Restore it to good repute by turning the indecent parts of the damned to flames, and those of the blessed to sunbeams; or imitate the modesty of Florence, who hides your David’s shame beneath some gilded leaves. And yet that statue is exposed upon a public square, not in a consecrated chapel.
“As I wish that God may pardon you, I do not write this out of any resentment.” 17
“Your art would be at home in some voluptuous bathhouse, certainly not in the highest chapel of the world.” Pietro Aretino’s righteous indignation would be quite out of place among “conservative” and “traditional” Catholics, who esteem Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel as one of the most piety-inducing sacred spaces in Western civilization. People are so far gone into the diabolic that they have lost their ability to delineate right from wrong.
It becomes even more demented for Michelangelo’s defenders to attempt to credibly uphold his supposed “Catholic faith,” when we examine his disgusting statue of a nude Jesus Christ, sculpted with enlarged testicles, which was successfully hidden from sight from the post-Renaissance era until recently. One glance at this supposedly reverent sacred art object crafted by Michelangelo, and the true Christian perceives that it is a Talmudic travesty of the image of the Son of God, and stands as evidence of the identity of the occult Catholic-impersonators who usurped the Petrine Office and patronized Michelangelo, instead of banishing him to the Arctic wastelands after sledgehammering his porn-Christ. Like the Isis worship in the six rooms of the papal palace, the candle-lit obscenities conducted by the hierarchy of the Church of Rome before this striptease Jesus, are from hell.
Rome’s eventual reaction against Michelangelo and the Renaissance nudes was, as we have said, liminal and staged, for pragmatic reasons. The ascendance of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic conspiracy required the fixing of its pagan canon
in the Sistine Chapel above all other sacred spaces. Once elite Catholic percipients had been conditioned and processed in its presence, and after their initiation was successfully concluded, then a reaction was allowed to exert itself, until what was a time capsule containing the Neoplatonic-Hermetic spiritual virus, was reopened on cue. That point was reached in a post-Vatican II pontificate, as confessed in 2014, by Antonio Paolucci, Director of the Vatican Museums, when he conceded that, “the process of obscuring the ‘Theology of the Body,” came to end with the pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II, and his successors. Director Paolucci freely and openly articulates the Renaissance gnosis of the Church of Rome’s pagan theology of sacred nudity:
“And there is Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel…There are the Ignudi—the twenty male nudes of the ceiling, ‘the most beautiful positions which they variously take on, seated and torisoned in their movements,’ as (Giorgio) Vasari wrote and who in the physical magnificence of the male bodies, called upon to glorify the papal oak, saw a sort of homage to the golden age of Pope Julius II. Those young bodies that attempt to take on the most diverse postures…in the anatomies that light and shade modulate from the milky lightness to the lit toes of bronze, there is all of Michelanglo’s passionate love for the supreme beauty of the naked male body…
“As regards the ‘Last Judgment,’ this immense gathering of nudes, a true ‘theology of the body’…above all the nudes…all of those breasts, buttocks and sexual organs exhibited in the Chapel of the pope…the Catholic Church…has allowed its artists to narrate the Beauty which is the shadow of God on earth, also by way of the representation of the naked human body.” 18
Would it be far-fetched to note the homoerotic dimension to the preceding male nude celebration?
Would it be irreverent to ask what makes human nudity in the streets outside the Sistine Chapel morally wrong, while representations of that nudity inside the holy precinct where the Sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary is said to be re-enacted in the Mass, is considered a theological virtue?
In the publication of the Pontifical Institute of John Paul II, A Body for Glory: Theology of the Body in the Papal Collections, it is stated on p. 13, “It was Pope John Paul II who described the Sistine Chapel as the sanctuary of the Theology of the Body.” This “theology” was reaffirmed by Pope Benedict XVI in his address in the Sistine Chapel, “Meeting with Artists,” November 21, 2009.
“…the significance of Hermes for the Renaissance Christian could not have been announced more triumphantly than by his depiction in marble at the very threshold of the great cathedral in Siena, in 1482.”19
In the order of egregious, pagan Church of Rome Renaissance art, after the Sistine Chapel and Alexander VI’s papal apartment, comes the Siena Cathedral, dating from the thirteenth century. The focus of our study is not the medieval part of the cathedral, but the Renaissance-era marble pavement which was installed mostly in the fifteenth century. Knowing that St. Augustine had denounced him as an idolater and with no possible excuse of ignorance, the Catholic hierarchy nevertheless proceeded to commission in 1488 in the Siena Cathedral, before the arches of the nave, an exquisitely beautiful, multi-colored marble glorification of “Hermes Trismegistus,” by Giovanni di Stefano. This magnificent image of the magician Hermes presides over the entrance to the Cathedral of Siena, an edifice which is supposed to be a temple of the God of Israel.
In a visual age where texts did not appeal to the people as effectively as images, it was this mosaic which had the distinction of manifesting and spreading the cult of Hermes to the laity not in a public square, but in the holy precinct of yet another sacred space where the Mass was offered.
“…in front of the central doorway, where a panel invites the visitor to enter ‘chastely into this temple of chastity, dedicated to the Virgin,’ Hermes Trismegistus is portrayed. As the scroll beneath the imposing figure explains, he was traditionally considered to be a contemporary of Moses. The learned Egyptian, whose doctrine the Humanists preached and studied, rests his hand upon a tablet supported by two sphynxes and offers a book to two figures on his right. They accept it, respectfully. Inscribed on the tablet is a sentence attributed to Poimandres (The Shepherds of Men), a text supposedly authored by Trismegistus:
“Deus omnium creator secum Deumfecit visibilem et hunc fecit primum et solum quo oblectatus est et valde amavit proprium Filium qui appellator Sanctum Verbum,’ 20 while the pages of the open book read: “Suscipio licteras et leges Egiptiu.”21 The reference to Egypt, the ancient seat of wisdom, which the two sphynxes also seem to symbolize, is clear. But Egyptian wisdom, entrusted to the peoples of the East and the West, is inseparable from its divine origin (‘Sanctum Verbum’). The inscription on the right refers to the Creation…” 22
“As we enter the church and approach the ancient god, a plaque warns us to ‘enter with pure heart this purest temple of the Virgin.’ Why did the Virgin open her chaste temple to a pagan deity? Can a Christian heart remain pure in the presence of a god whose temple houses demon-souled statues that lived and spoke and worked wonders?” 23
We find the answer by recourse to our time machine: it is what is known colloquially in the twenty-first century as the “politically correct” response, yet it was the response in 1488 as well: the image of Hermes is appropriate for the cathedral because he is a heathen prophet of Christianity and consequently in the category of pious theology, not diabolic sorcery; that was the insinuation more than five hundred years ago and today it is the openly syncretic explanation. It is a theology alright, but not that of the Church of Christ or of St. Augustine. The defiance is unmistakable.
Augustine “condemned Hermes for being ‘friendly to the tricks of demons’ even while predicting the fall of Egyptian demonolatry before the irresistible rise of the new faith. He found Hermes especially perverse for having mourned the collapse of the old religion founded on fraud.” 24
“Hermes.dominates the physical and ideal space of the floor mosaic in the cathedral of Siena, where the sibyls and Hermes himself, as their scrolls show, are clearly connected to the Florentine rebirth of ancient magic and pious theology.” 25
Fraud was the order of the day in Renaissance ecclesiastical art: magnificent beauty married to the infernal.
1 Edith Balas, Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel (1995), p. 33.
2 Ibid., p. 28.
3 In mythology, Ganymede is the object of the unrequited homosexual desire of the god Zeus. Ganymede is depicted in Attic vase painting and Hellenistic and ancient Roman art as naked and comely.
4 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Norton, 1968), p. 15; emphasis supplied.
5 The vault of the Sistine Chapel was commissioned by Pope Julius II. Michelangelo crafted the work from 1508-1512. “The Last Judgment” was commissioned by Medici Pope Clement VII in 1534 and supported by Pope Paul III after Clement’s death. Michelangelo completed it in 1541.
6 Pauline Moffit Watts, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Three Renaissance Neoplatonists: Cusanus, Ficino and Pico,” in Supplementum Festivum, p. 28.
7 John J. Allen Jr., “New Parlor Game,” Oct. 28, 2016, cruxnow.com
8 Ibid. In October, 2016, Pope Francis called Archbishop Marini out of semiretirement and appointed him to Rome’s Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW).
9 This is the dichotomy which the Pharisees delineated in their criticism of Jesus: that He was putting the ignorant Jewish masses, the bumpkin am ha’aretz, on the same level as the elite Jews (John 7:48-49). All that’s missing from Pico’s list of dim-witted “tailors, cooks, butchers, shepherds, servants, maids” are carpenters. Compare Pico’s words with those of the English Protestant reformer William Tyndale, who, while at Little Sodbury Manor, stated to a fellow priest, that he would “make a boy who drives the plough know more of Scripture than the priest himself. Quite the opposite of their publicly stated intentions of higher liberation for all humanity, Rome’s occult workers of iniquity establish a duality of “higher and more perfec
t spirits,” contrasted with those who supposedly have lesser ones.
10 Wind, op. cit., pp. 17-21.
11 Pascendi Dominici Gregis: On The Doctrine Of The Modernists, Encyclical of Pope Pius X, September 8, 1907.
12 Ibid., pp. 23-24.
13 John Addington Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1899), vol. 2, pp. 40-41.
14 Aretino was certainly an outrageous figure whose command of the language sometimes entailed lubricious verse-satire at the expense of Leo X and Neoplatonic-Hermeticism’s grandiose conceits. His reputation has been so thoroughly blackened by the malignant babble of his enemies however, that one should approach their accounts of him with caution. Some of his writings were undoubtedly obscene, but Aretino penned them for the secular world, never for inclusion in a church setting. He excused the nudity of Michelangelo’s statue David, because it was exhibited in a public square, and not in the sacred sanctuary of a Catholic Church. His objection was to extravagant nudity in holy places, and despite his own numerous personal sins and failings, his critique in this regard was valid.
15 Cf. Erica Tietze-Conrat, “Neglected Contemporary Sources Related to Michelangelo,” in Art Bulletin, June 1943. The text of Aretino’s letter was translated and published by John Addington Symonds, op. cit., pp. 51-55.
16 Raffaello Sanzio (1483-1520), known to posterity as the painter, “Raphael.”
17 The generally accepted date for the letter is November, 1545.
18 Antonio Paolucci, A Body for Glory: Theology of the Body in the Papal Collections (Rome: Pontifico Istituto Giovanni Paolo II, 2014), pp. 7-9.
19 Angela Voss, ed., Marsilio Ficino (2006), p. 16.
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