§ 63. DANTE, PETRARCA, BOCCACCIO. 569
windows of Gothic cathedrals, or by the fact that the Virgin Mary was called a rose by St. Bernard and other mediaeval divines and poets.
Following the geocentric cosmology of the Ptolemaic system, the poet located hell within the earth, purgatory in the southern hemisphere, and heaven in the starry firmament. Hell is a yawning cavity, widest at the top and consisting of ten circles. Purgatory is a mountain up which souls ascend. The heavenly realm consists of nine circles, culminating in the empyrean where the pure divine essence dwells.
Among these regions of the spiritual and future world, Dante distributes the best-known characters of his and of former generations. He spares neither Guelf nor Ghibelline, neither pope nor emperor, and gives to all their due. He adapts the punishment to the nature of the sin, the reward to the measure of virtue, and shows an amazing ingenuity and fertility of imagination in establishing the correspondence of outward condition to moral character. Thus the cowards and indifferentists in the vestibule of the Inferno are driven by a whirling flag and stung by wasps and flies. The licentious are hurried by tempestuous winds in total darkness, with carnal lust still burning, but never gratified.
The infernal hurricane, that never rests
Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine,
Whirling them round ; and smiting, it molests them ;
It hither, thither, downward, upward, drives them.
— Inferno, V. 31-43.
The gluttonous lie on the ground, exposed to showers of hail and foul water ; blasphemers supine upon a plain of burning sand, while sparks of fire, like flakes of snow in the Alps, slowly and constantly descend upon their bodies. The wrathful are forever tearing one another.
And I, who stood intent upon beholding, Saw people mud-besprent in that lagoon, All of them naked and with angry look. They smote each other not alone with hands, But with the head and with the breast and feet Tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth.
— Inferno, VII. 100 sqq.
670 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
The simonists, who sell religion for money and turn the temple of God into a den of thieves, are thrust into holes, head downwards, with their feet protruding and tormented with flames. The arch-heretics are held in red-hot tombs, and tyrants in a stream of boiling blood, shot at by the centaurs whenever they attempt to rise. The traitors are immersed in a lake of ice with Satan, the arch-traitor and the embodiment of selfishness, malignity and turpitude. Their very tears turn to ice, symbol of utter hardness, and Satan is forever consuming in his three mouths the three arch-traitors, Judas, Brutus and Cassius. Milton represents Satan as the archangel who even in hell exalts himself and in pride exclaims, " Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven," and the poet leaves the mind of the reader disturbed by a feeling of admiration for Lucifer's untamed ambition and superhuman power. Dante's Satan awakens disgust and horror, and the inscription over the entrance to hell makes the reader shudder: —
Through me ye enter the abode of woe ; Through me to endless sorrow are brought ; Through me amid the souls accurst ye go. ****** All hope abandon — ye who enter here !
Per me si va nella citta dolente ; Per vie si va nelV eterno dolure ;
Per vie si va tra la perduta gente.
****«» Lasciate ogni speranza, voi cK' entrate.
Passing out from the domain of gloom and dole, Virgil leads the poet to purgatory, where the dawn of day breaks. This realm, as has been said, comes nearer to our common life than hell or paradise.^ Hope dwells here. Song, not wailing, is heard. A ship appears, moved by an angel and filled with spirits, singing the hymn of redemption. Cato approaches and urges the guide and Dante to wash themselves on the shore from all remainders of hell and to hurry on. In purgatory, they pass through seven stages, which correspond to the seven mortal sins, the two lowest, pride and envy, the highest, wantonness and luxury. All the penitents have stamped on their foreheads seven P's, — the first letter of the word peccata, sins,
1 ytroug, p. 142.