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

id="note-1708" epub:type="endnote">

By excommunication, which shut out its victims from the table of the Lord. ↩

Pope Boniface VIII, who is here accused of dealing out ecclesiastical censures only to be paid for revoking them. ↩

John the Baptist. But here is meant his image on the golden florin of Florence. ↩

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 Inferno II 103 he calls Beatrice “the true praise of God.” ↩

Mr. Gary quotes, Proverbs 8:27:⁠—

“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, Paradise 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 turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said: lt; ‘Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just circumference, O World!’ ”

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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.”

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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.”

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Milton, Paradise Lost, VII 168:⁠—

“Boundless the deep, because I Am, who fill
Infinitude, nor vacuous the space.”

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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, Paradise Lost, I 63:⁠—

“No light, but rather darkness visible.”

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Galatians 3:23:⁠—

“But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed.”

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Matthew 7:21:⁠—

“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.”

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Dryden, “Religio Laici,” 208:⁠—

“Then those who followed Reason’s dictates right,
Lived up, and lifted high her natural light,
With Socrates may see their Maker’s face,
While thousand rubric martyrs want a place.”

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Matthew 12:41:⁠—

“The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it.”

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The righteous and the unrighteous at the day of judgment. ↩

Revelation 20:12:⁠—

“And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books 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 Purgatorio VI 97:⁠—

“O German Albert, who abandonest her
That has grown savage and indomitable,
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 so 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 from 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 Alphonsos, but do not agree as to which one. Tommaseo says it was Ferdinand IV (1295⁠–⁠1312), and he is probably right. It was this monarch, or rather 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 within thirty days; and before the time had expired he was found dead upon his sofa. From this event he received the surname of 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, Purgatorio VII 101, as one “who feeds in luxury and ease.” ↩

Charles II, king of Apulia, whose virtues maj 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 Note 922. ↩

Frederick, son of Peter of