The Heaven of the Fixed Stars continued. St. John examines Dante on Charity, in the sense of Love, as in Milton, Par. Lost, XII. 583:--
"Love,
By name to come called Charity."
Ananias, the disciple at Damascus, whose touch restored the sight of Saul. Acts ix. 17: "And Ananias went his way, and entered into the house, and putting his hands on him, said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost. And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales; and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized."
God is the beginning and end of all my love.
The commentators differ as to which of the philosophers Dante here refers; whether to Aristotle, Plato, or Pythagoras.
The angels.
Exodus xxxiii. 19: "And he said, I will make all my goodliess pass before thee."
John i. I: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . .And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us full of grace and truth."
By all the dictates of human reason and divine authority.
In Christian art the eagle is the symbol of St. John, indicating his more fervid imagination and deeper insight into divine mysteries. Sometimes even the saint was represented with the head and feet of an eagle, and the hands and body of a man.
All living creatures.
Isaiah vi. 3 : "As one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory."
The soul of Adam.
"Tell me, of what age was Adam when he was created?" is one of the questions in the Anglo-Saxon Dialogue between Saturn and Solomon: and the answer is, "I tell thee, he was thirty winters old." And Buti says: 'He was created of the age of thirty-three, or thereabout; and therefore the author says that Adam alone was created by God in perfect age and stature, and no other man." And Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, § 39: "Some divines count Adam thirty years old at his creation, because they suppose him created in the perfect age and stature of man."
Stehelin, Traditions of the Jews, I.16, quotes Rabbi Eliezer as saying "that the first man reached from the earth to the firmament of heaven; but that, after he had sinned, God laid his hands on him and reduced him to a less size." And Rabbi Salomon writes, that "when he lay down, his head was in the east and his feet in the west."
Parhelion is an imperfect image of the sun, formed by reflection in the clouds. All things are such faint reflections of the Creator; but he is the reflection of none of them.
Buti interprets the passage differently, giving to the word pareglio the meaning of ricettacolo, receptacle.
In Limbo, longing for Paradise, where the only punishment is to live in desire, but without hope. Inf. IV. 41:--
"Lost are we, and are only so far punished,
That without hope we live on in desire."
Most of the Oriental languages claim the honour of being the language spoken by Adam in Paradise. Juan Bautista de Erro claims it for the Basque, or Vascongada. See Alphabet of Prim. Lang. of Spain, Pt. II. Ch. 2, Erving's Tr.
See Canto XVI. 79:--
"All things of yours have their mortality,
Even as yourselves."
Dante, De Volg. Eloq., I. Ch. 4, says, speaking of Adam: "What was the first word he spake will, I doubt not, readily suggest itself to every one of sound mind as being what God is, namely, El, either in the way of question or of answer."
The word used by Matthew, xxvii. 46, is Eli, and by Mark, xv. 34, Eloi which Dante assumes to be of later use than El. There is, I believe, no authority for this. El is God; Eli, / or Eloi, my God.
Horace, Ars Poet., 60 : "As the woods change their leaves in autumn, and the earliest fall, so the ancient words pass away, and the new flourish in the freshness of youth. . . . . .Many that now have fallen shall spring up again, and others fall which now are held in honour, if usage wills, which is the judge, the law, and the rule of language.
The mount of Purgatory, on whose summit was the Terrestrial Paradise.
The sixth hour is noon in the old way of reckoning; and at noon the sun has completed one quarter or quadrant of the arc of his revolution, and changes to the next. The hour which is second to the sixth, is the hour which follows it, or one o'clock. This gives seven hours for Adam's stay in Paradise; and so says Peter Comestor (Dante's Peter Mangiador) in his ecclesiastical history.
The Talmud, as quoted by Stehelin, Traditions of the Jews, I. 20, gives the following account: "The day has twelve hours. In the first hour the dust of which Adam was formed was brought together. In the second, this dust was made a rude, unshapely mass. In the third, the limbs were stretched out. In the fourth, a soul was lodged in it. In the the fifth, Adam stood upon his feet. In the sixth, he assigned the names of all things that were created. In the seventh, he received Eve for his consort. In the eighth, two went to bed and four rose out of it; the begetting and birth of two children in that time, namely, Cain and his sister. In the ninth, he was forbid to eat of the fruit of the tree. In the tenth, he disobeyed. In the eleventh, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced. In the twelfth, he was banished, or driven out of the garden."