The Heaven of Jupiter continued.
The eagle speaks as one person, though composed of a multitude of spirits. Here Dante's idea of unity under the Empire finds expression.
This Mirror of Divine Justice is the planet Saturn, to which Dante alludes in Canto IX. 61, where, speaking of the Intelligences of Saturn, he says:
Above us there are mirrors, Thrones you call them,
From which shines out on us God Judicant."
Whether a good life outside the pale of the holy Catholic faith could lead to Paradise.
Dante here calls the blessed spirits lauds, or "praises of the grace divine," as in Inf. II. 103, he calls Beatrice "the true praise of God."
Mr. Cary quotes, Proverbs viii. 27:--
"When he prepared the heavens, I was there; when he set a compass
upon the face of the depth,. . . . .then I was by him."
And Milton, Par. Lost VII. 224:--
"And in his hand
He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God's eternal store. to circumscribe
This Universe, and all created things.
One foot he centred, and the other towed
Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said: 'Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just circumference, 0 World!'"
The Word or Wisdom of the Deity far exceeds any manifestation of it in the creation.
Shakespeare, Henry VIII., III. 2 :--
"Fling away ambition,
By that sin fell the angels."
Dryden, Religio Laici, 39:--
"How can the less the greater comprehend?
Or finite reason reach infinity?
For what could fathom God is more than He."
Milton, Par. Lost, VII. 168:
"Boundless the deep, because I am, who fill
Infinitude, nor vacuous the space."
The human mind can never be so powerful but that it will perceive the Divine Mind to be infinitely beyond its comprehension; or, as Buti interprets, -- reading gli è parvente, which reading I have followed, --" much greater than what appears to the human mind, and what the human intellect sees."
Milton, Par. Lost, 1.63:--
"No light, but rather darkness visible."
Galatians iii. 23 : "But hefore faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed."
Matthew vii 21: "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven."
Dryden, Religio Laici, 208: --
"Then those who followed Reason's dictates right,
Lived up, and lifted up her natural light,
With Socrates may see their Maker's face,
while thousand rubric martyrs want a place."
Matthew xii 41: The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it .
The righteous and the unrighteous at the day of judgment.
Revelations xx 12: " And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the bouks were opened : and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works."
This is the German Albert of Purg. VI 97:--
"0 German Albert who abandonest her
That has grown savage and intdomitable,
And oughtest to bestride her saddle-bow,
May a just judgment from the stars down fall
Upon thy blood , and be it new and open
That thy successor may have fear thereof;
Because thy father and thyself have suffered,
By greed of those transalpine lands distrained,
The garden of the empire to be waste."
The deed which was soon to move the pen of the Recording Angel was the invasion of Bohemia in 1303.
Philip the Fair of France, who, after his defeat at Courtray in 1302, falsified the coin of the realm, with which he paid his troops He was killed in 1314 by a fall form his horse, caused by the attack of a wild boar. Dante uses the word cotenna, the skin of the wild boar, for the boar itself.
The allusion here is to the border wars between John Baliol of Scotland, and Edward I. of England.
Most of the commentators say that this king of Spain was one of the AIphonsos, but do not agree as to which one. Tommaseo says it was Ferdinand lV. (1295-1312), and he is probably of right. It was this monarch, or rather that his generals, who took Gibraltar from the Moors. In 1312 he put to death unjustly the brothers Carvajal, who on the scaffold summoned him to appear before the judgment seat of God thirty days; and before the time had expired he was found dead upon his sofa. From this event, he received the surname El Emplazado, the Summoned. It is said that his death was caused by intemperance.
The Bohemian is Winceslaus II., son of Ottocar. He is mentioned, Purg. VII. 101, as one "who feeds in luxury and ease."
Charles II., king of Apulia, whose virtues may be represented by a unit and his vices by a thousand. He was called the "Cripple of Jerusalem," on account of his lameness, and because as king of Apulia he also bore the title of King of Jerusalem. See Purg. XX. Note 79.
Frederick, son of Peter of Aragon, and king, or in some form ruler of Sicily, called from Mount Etna the "Island of the Fire." The Ottimo comments thus : ''Peter of Aragon was liberal and magnanimous, and the author says that this man is avaricious and pusillanimous." Perhaps his greatest crime in the eyes of Dante was his abandoning the cause of the Imperialists
According to Virgil, Anchises died in Sicily, "on the joyless coast of Drepanum." Aeneid III.708, Davidson's Tr.: " Here, alas! after being tossed by so many storms at sea, I lose my sire Anchises, my solace in every care and suffering. Here thou, best of fathers, whom in vain, alas! I saved from so great dangers, forsakest me, spent with toils."
134, In diminutive letters, and not in Roman capitals, like the DILIGITE JUSTITIAM of Canto XVIII. 91, and the record of the virtues and vices of the "Cripple of Jerusalem."
The uncle of Frederick of Sicily was James, king of the Balearic Islands. He joined Philip the Bold of France in his disastrous invasion of Catalonia; and in consequence lost his own crown.
The brother of Frederick was James of Aragon, who, on becoming king of that realm, gave up Sicily, which his father had acquired.
By these acts they dishonoured their native land and the crowns they wore.
Dionysius, king of Portugal, who reigned from 1279 to 1325. The Ottimo says that, "given uo wholly to the acquisition of wealth, he led the life of a merchant, and had money dealings with all the great merchants of his reign; nothing regal, nothing magnificent, can be recorded of him."
Philalethes is disposed to vindicate the character of Dionysius against these aspersions, and to think them founded only in the fact that Dionysius loved the arts of peace better than the more shining art of war, joined in no crusade against the Moors, and was a patron of manufactures and commerce.
The Ottimo's note on this nameless Norwegian is curious: "As his islands are situated at the uttermost extremities of the earth, so his life is on the extreme of reasonableness and civilization."
Benvenuto remarks only that "Norway is a cold northern region, where the days are very short, and whence come excellent falcons." Buti is still more brief. He says "That is, the king of Norway." Neither of these commentators, nor any of the later ones, suggest the name of this monarch, except the Germans, Philalethes and Witte, who think it may be Eric the Priest-Hater, or Hakon Longshanks.
Rascia or Ragusa is a city in Dalmatia, situated on the Adriatic, and capital of the kingdom of that name. The king here alluded to is Uroscius II., who married a daughter of the Emperor Michael Palaeologus, and counterfeited the Venetian coin.
In this line I have followed the reading male ha visto, instead of the more common one, male agguistò.
The 0ttimo comments as follows '' Here he reproves the vile and unseemly lives of the kings of Hungary, down to Andrea " (Dante's contemporary), "whose life the Hungarians praised, and whose death they wept."
If it can make the Pyrenees a bulwark to protect it against the invasion of Philip the Fair of France. It was not till four centuries later that Louis XIV. made his famous boast, "Il n'y a plus de Pyrenees."
In proof of this prediction the example of Cyprus is given.
Nicosia and Famagosta are cities of Cyprus, here taken for the whole island, in 1300 badly governed by Henry II. of the house of the Lusignani "And well he may call him beast," says the Ottimo, "for he was wholly given up to lust and sensuality, which should be far removed from every king."
Upon this line Benvenuto comments with unusual vehemence. "This king," he says, ""does not differ nor depart from the side of the other beasts; that is, of the other vicious kings. And of a truth, Cyprus with her people differeth not, nor is separated front the bestial life of the rest ; rather it surpasseth and exceedeth all peoples and kings of the kingdoms of Christendom to superfluity of luxury, glutttony, effeminacy, and every kind of pleasure. Put to attempt to describe the kinds, the sumptuousness, the variety, and the frequency of their banquets, would be disgusting to narrate, and tedious and harmful to write. Therefore men who live soberly and temperately should avert their eyes from beholding, and their ears from hearing, the meretricious, lewd, and fetid manners of that island, which, with God's permission, the Genoese have now invaded, captured, and evil entreated and laid under contribution."