The Heaven of the Fixed Stars continued. The anger of St. Peter; and the ascent to the Primum Mobile, or Crystalline Heaven.
Dante, Convito II. 15, makes this Crystalline Heaven the symbol of Moral Philosophy. He says: 'The Crystalline Heaven, which has previously been called the Primum Mobile, has a very manifest resemblance to Moral Philosophy; for Moral Philosophy, as Thomas says in treating of the second book of the Ethics, directs us to the other sciences. For, as the Philosopher says in the fifth of the Ethics, legal justice directs us to learn the sciences, and orders them to be learned and mastered, so that they may not be abandoned ; so this heaven directs with its movement the daily revolutions of all the others, by which daily they all receive here below the virtue of all their parts. For if its revolution did not thus direct, little of their virtues would reach here below, and little of their sight. Hence, supposing it were possible for this ninth heaven to stand still, the third part of heaven would not be seen in each part of the earth; and Saturn would be hidden from each part of the earth fourteen years and a half; and Jupiter, six years; and Mars, almost a year; and the Sun, one hundred and eighty-two days and fourteen hours (I say days, that is, so much time as so many days would measure); and Venus and Mercury would conceal and show themselves nearly as the Sun; and the Moon would be hidden from all people for the space of fourteen days and a half. Truly there would be here below no production, nor life of inimals, nor plants; there would be night, nor day, nor week, nor month, nor year; but the whole universe would be deranged, and the movement of the stars in vain. And not otherwise, were Moral Philosophy to cease, the other sciences would be for a time concealed, and there would be no production, nor life of felicity, and in vain would be the writings or discoveries of antiquity. Wherefore it is very manifest that this heaven bears a resemblance to Moral Philosophy.
Without desire for more.
St. Peter, St. James, St. John, and Adam.
If the white planet Jupiter should become as red as Mars.
Pope Boniface VIII., who won his way to the Popedom by intrigue. See Inf. III. Note 59, and XIX. Note 53.
The Vatican hill, to which the body of St. Peter was transferred from the catacombs.
Luke xxiii. 44: "And there was darkness over all the earth And the sun was darkened."
Linus was the immediate successor of St. Peter as Bishop of Rome, and Cletus of Linus. They were both martyrs of the first age of the Church.
Sixtus and Pius were Popes and martyrs of the second age of the Church; Calixtus and Urban, of the third.
On the right hand of the Pope the favoured Guel£s, and on the left the persecuted Ghibellines.
The Papal banner, on which are the keys of St. Peter.
The wars against the Ghibellines in general, and particularly that waged against the Colonna family, ending in the destruction of Palestrina. Inf. XXVII. 85:--
"But he, the Prince of the new Pharisees,
Having a war near unto Lateran
And not with Saracens nor with the Jews,
For each one of his enemies was Christian,
And none of them had been to conquer Acre,
Nor merchandising in the Sultan's land."
The sale of indulgences, stamped with the Papal seal, bearing the head of St. Peter.
Matthew vii. 15 : "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves."
Psalm xliv. 23: "Awake, why sleepest thou, 0 Lord?"
Clement V. of Gascony, made Pope in 1305, and John XXII. of Cahors in France, in 1316. Buti makes the allusion more general: "They of Cahors and Gascony are preparing to drink the blood of the martyrs, because they were preparing to be Popes, cardinals, archbishops and bishops, and prelates in the Church of God, that is built with the blood of the martyrs."
Dante alludes elsewhere to this intervention of Providence to save the Roman Empire by the hand of Scipio. Convito, IV. 5, he says : "Is not the hand of God visible, when in the war with Hannibal, having lost so many citizens, that thee bushels of rings were carried to Africa, the Romans would have abandoned the land, if that blessed youth Scipio had not undertaken the expedition to Africa, to secure its freedom?"
When the sun is in Capricorn; that is, from the middle of December to the middle of January.
Boccaccio, Ninfale d'Ameto, describing a battle between two flocks of swans, says the spectators "saw the air full of feathers, as when the nurse of Jove [Amalthaea, the Goat] holds Apollo, the white snow is seen to fall in flakes."
And Whittier, Snow-Bound:--
"Unwarmed by any sunset light,
The gray day darkened into night,
A night made hoary with the swarm
And whirl-dance of the blinding storm,
As zigzag wavering to and fro
Crossed and recrossed the wingéd snow."
The spirits described in Canto XXII. 131, as
"The triumphant throng
That comes rejoicing through this rounded ether,"
and had remained behind when Christ and the Virgin Mary ascended.
Till his sight could follow them no more, on account of the exceeding vastness of the space between.
Canto XXII. 133.
The first climate is the torrid zone, the first from the equator. From midst to end, is from the meridian to the horizon. Dante had been, then,six hours in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars; for, as Milton says, Par.Lost,V.580:--
"Time, though in eternity, applied
To motion, measures all things durable,
By present, past, and future."
Being now in the meridian of the Straits of Gibraltar, Dante sees to
the westward of Cadiz the sea Ulysses sailed, when he turned his stern unto
morning and made his oars wings for his mad flight, as described in Inf. XXVI.
Eastward he almost sees the Phoenician coast; almost, and not quite, because, say the commentators, it was already night there.
Europa, daughter of King Agenor, borne to the island of Crete on the back of Jupiter, who had taken the shape of a bull.
Ovid, Met., II., Addison's Tr. :--
"Agenor's royal daughter, as she played
among the fields, the milk-white bull surveyed,
And viewed his spotless body with delight,
And at a distance kept him in her sight.
A length she plucked the rising flowers, and fed
The gentle beast, and fondly stroked his head.
Till now grown wanton and devoid of fear,
Not knowing that she pressed the Thunderer,
She placed herself upon his back, and rode.
O'er the fields and meadows, seated on the god.
"He gently marched along, and by degrees
Left the dry meadow, and approached the seas;
Where now he dips his hoofs and wets his thigh;
Now plunges in, and carries off the prize."
See Canto XXII. Note 151.
The sun was in Aries, two signs in advance of Gemini, in which Dante was.
Donnea again. See Canto XXIV. Note 118.
Purg. XXXI. 49.:--
"Never to thee presented art or nature
Pleasure so great as the fair limbs wherein
I was enclosed, which scattered are in
earth."
The Gemini, or Twins, are Castor and Pollux, the sons of Leda, And as Jupiter, their father, came to her in the shape of a swan, this sign of the zodiac is called the nest of Leda. Dante now mounts up from the Heaven of the fixed stars to the Primum Mobile, or Crystalline Heaven.
Dante's desire to know in what part of this heaven he was.
All the other heavens have their Regents or Intelligences. See Canto II. Note 131. But the Primum Mobile has the Divine Mind alone.
By that precinct Dante means the Empyrean, which embraces the Primum Mobile, as that does all the other heavens below it.
Mrs. Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art I. 139, remarks : "The legend which supposes St. John reserved alive has not been generally received in the Church, and as a subject of painting it is very uncommon. It occurs in the Menologium Graecum, where the grave into which St. John descends is, according to the legend, fossa in crucis figuram (in the form of a cross). In a series of the deaths of the Apostles, St. John is ascending from the grave; for, according to the Greek legend, St. John died without pain or change, and immediately rose again in bodily form, and ascended into heaven to rejoin Christ and the Virgin."
The half of ten is five, and the fifth is two. The product of these, when multiplied together, is ten.
Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality:--
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."
Aurora, daughter of Hyperion, or the Sun. Purg. II. 7:--
"So that the white and the vermilion cheeks
Of beautiful Aurora, where I was,
By too great age were changing into orange."
Or, perhaps, to steer, and
"Over the high seas to keep
The barque of Peter to its proper bearings."
This neglected centesimal was the omission of some inconsiderable fraction or centesimal part, in the computation of the year according to the Julian calendar, which was corrected in the Gregorian, some two centuries and a half after Dante's death. By this error, in long lapse of time, the months would cease to correspond to the seasons, and January be no longer a winter, but a spring month."
Sir John Herschel, Treatisse on Astronomy, Ch. XIII., says: "The Julian rule made every fourth year, without exception, a bissextile. This is, in fact, an over-correction ; it supposes the length of the tropical year to be 3651/4 d., which is too great, and thereby induces an error of 7 days in 900 years, as will easily appear on trial. Accordingly, so early as the year 1414, it began to be perceived that the equinoxes were gradually creeping away from the 21st of March and September, where they ought to have always fallen had the Julian year been exact, and happening (as it appeared) too early. The necessity of a fresh and effectual reform in the calendar was from that time continually urged, and at length admitted. The change (which took place under the Popedom of Gregory XIII.) consisted in the omission of ten nominal days after the 4th of October, 1582, (so that the next day was called the 15th and not the 5th), and the promulgation of the rule explained for future regulation."
It will appear from the verse of Dante, that this error and its consequences had been noticed a century earlier than the year mentioned by Herschel. Dante speaks ironically; naming a very long period, and meaning a very short one.
Dante here refers either to the reforms he expected from the Emperor Henry VII., or to those he as confidently looked for from Can Grande della Scala, the Veltro, or greyhound, of Inf. I. 101, who was to slay the she-wolf, and make her "perish in her pain," and whom he so warmly eulogize in Canto XVII. of the Paradiso. Alas for the vanity of human wishes! Patient Italy has waited more than five centuries for the fulfilment of this prophecy , but at length she has touched the bones of her prophet , and "is revived and stands upon her feet."