simonia

Simon Magus (Simon the Magician) appears in Acts 8:9-24. He was a sorcerer in Samaria who, having witnessed the apostles bestowing the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands, offered them money for the same power. Peter's response was unambiguous: 'May your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money.' The exchange gave Christianity a proper noun for the sin of treating sacred things as commodities. Simonia entered Latin by the sixth century.

Simony became one of the most persistent problems in medieval Christianity. Bishops bought their positions from kings. Abbots sold monastic offices. Parish priests paid for their appointments and recovered the cost from parishioners. The system was self-perpetuating: if you paid for your position, you needed to extract revenue from it to break even. The Investiture Controversy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries — the struggle between popes and emperors over the appointment of bishops — was, at its core, a fight about simony. Pope Gregory VII excommunicated Emperor Henry IV in 1076 partly over the issue.

Dante placed simonists head-down in flaming pits in the eighth circle of Hell (Inferno, Canto 19). Their feet stuck out, burning. Dante used the passage to attack contemporary popes — particularly Nicholas III and Boniface VIII — for selling church offices. The punishment was an inversion: those who had turned the sacred upside down were themselves turned upside down. The satire was specific. Dante named names.

The word survived the Reformation, which treated simony as evidence of Catholic corruption. Protestant churches developed their own forms of the same problem — paid pews, purchased livings, ministerial positions granted by wealthy patrons — but the word remained Catholic in flavor. Today, simony is rare as an explicit practice but common as a concept: any transaction in which spiritual authority is bought, sold, or exchanged for money or favors is still called simony.