The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

could not find a drop of water, he dug a grave in the sand, and lay down in it to die, hoping that his body, soon buried by the sand heaped up by the wind, would not fall a prey to wild beasts. Barius attributes to him a dream, in which he thought he was drinking copiously; at all events, after sleeping some hours he awoke in condition to continue his journey. After visiting Jerusalem, he went to Mount Tabor, where he remained forty days. He there lived in an old cistern; and it was amid watchings and prayers on the scene of the Transfiguration that he conceived the idea of his principal writings: ‘The Harmony of the Old and New Testaments’; ‘The Exposition of the Apocalypse’; and ‘The Psalter of Ten Strings.’ ”

On his return to Italy, Joachim became a Cistercian monk in the monastery of Corazzo in Calabria, of which erelong he became Abbot; but, wishing for greater seclusion, he soon withdrew to Flora, among the mountains, where he founded another monastery, and passed the remainder of his life in study and contemplation. He died in 1202, being seventy-two years of age.

“His renown was great,” says Rousselot, Histoire de l’Évangile Éternel, p. 27, “and his duties numerous; nevertheless his functions as Abbot of the monastery which he had founded did not prevent him from giving himself up to the composition of the writings which he had for a long time meditated. This was the end he had proposed to himself; it was to attain it that he had wished to live in solitude. If his desire was not wholly realized, it was so in great part; and Joachim succeeded in laying the foundations of the Eternal Gospel. He passed his days and nights in writing and in dictating. ‘I used to write,’ says his secretary Lucas, ‘day and night in copybooks, what he dictated and corrected on scraps of paper, with two other monks whom he employed in the same work.’ It was in the middle of these labors that death surprised him.”

In Abbot Joachim’s time at least, this Eternal Gospel was not a book, but a doctrine, pervading all his writings. Later, in the middle of the thirteenth century, some such book existed, and was attributed to John of Parma. In the Romance of the Rose, Chaucer’s Tr., 1798, it is thus spoken of:⁠—

“ ‘A thousande and two hundred yere
Five-and-fifte, farther ne nere,
Broughten a boke with sorie grace,
To yeven ensample in common place,
That sayed thus, though it were fable,
This is the Gospel! pardurable
That fro the Holie Ghost is sent.
Well were it worthy to be ybrent.
Entitled was in soche manere,
This boke of whichè I tell here;
There n as no wight in al Paris,
Beforne our Ladle at Parvis
That thei ne might the bokè by.
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“The Universite, that was a slepe,
Gan for to braied, and taken kepe;
And at the noise the hedde up cast;
Ne never, sithen, slept it [so] fast:
But up it stert, and armes toke
Ayenst this false horrible boke,
All redy battaile for to make,
And to the judge the boke thei take.”

The Eternal Gospel taught that there were three epochs in the history of the world, two of which were already passed, and the third about to begin. The first was that of the Old Testament, or the reign of the Father; the second, that of the New Testament, or the reign of the Son; and the third, that of Love, or the reign of the Holy Spirit. To use his own words, as quoted by Rousselot, Histoire de l’Évangile Éternel, p. 78:⁠—

“As the letter of the Old Testament seems to belong to the Father, by a certain peculiarity of resemblance, and the letter of the New Testament to the Son; so the spiritual intelligence, which proceeds from both, belongs to the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, the age when men were joined in marriage was the reign of the Father; that of the Preachers is the reign of the Son; and the age of Monks, ordo monachorum, the last, is to be that of the Holy Spirit. The first before the law, the second under the law, the third with grace.”

The germ of this doctrine, says the same authority, p. 59, is in Origen, who had said before the Abbot Joachim:⁠—

“We must leave to believers the historic Christ and the Gospel, the Gospel of the letter; but to the Gnostics alone belongs the Divine Word, the Eternal Gospel, the Gospel of the Spirit.”

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The Heaven of the Sun continued. Let the reader imagine fifteen of the largest stars, and to these add the seven of Charles’s Wain, and the two last stars of the Little Bear, making in all twenty-four, and let him arrange them in two concentric circles, revolving in opposite directions, and he will have the image of what Dante now beheld. ↩

Iliad, XVIII 487:⁠—

“The Bear, which they also call by the appellation of the Wain, which there revolves and watches Orion; but it alone is free from the baths of the ocean.”

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The constellation of the Little Bear as much resembles a horn as it does a bear. Of this horn the Pole Star forms the smaller end. ↩

Ariadne, whose crown was, at her death, changed by Bacchus into a constellation. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, Croxall’s Tr.:⁠—

“And bids her crown among the stars be placed,
With an eternal constellation graced.
The golden circlet mounts; and, as it flies,
Its diamonds twinkle in the distant skies;
There, in their pristine form, the gemmy rays
Between Alcides and the dragon blaze.”

Chaucer, Legende of Good Women:⁠—

“And in the sygne of Taurus men may se
The stones of hire corowne shyne clere.”

And Spenser, Faerie Queene, VI x 13:⁠—

“Looke! how the crowne which Ariadne wore
Upon her yvory forehead that same day
That Theseus her unto his bridale bore,
When the bold Centaures made that bloudy fray
With