figured thus sitting in the “limbo,” or fringe, of hell, with all the great spirits of antiquity, who had lived before Christianity and without baptism; they were free from torment, but were sad, because they felt the desire, but had no hope, of seeing God.
Dante had been a diligent and reverential student of Aristotle, especially in the commentaries of St Thomas Aquinas. In his ‘Convito,’ he says that “Aristotle is most worthy of trust and obedience, as being the master-artist who considers of and teaches us the end[1] of human life, to which, as men, we are ordained.” In the 11th canto of the ‘Inferno,’ he follows up Aristotle’s views of the “unnatural” character of usury (see above, p. 122), and places usurers in hell among those who do violence to God and Nature, the reasons for which he sets forth in a learned discourse. But the most striking thing of all is to find that Dante, in the 24th canto of the ‘Paradiso,’ commences the statement of his own theological creed in words taken directly from Aristotle’s definition of the Deity—
One sole eternal Godhead, of whose love
All heaven is moved, himself unmoved the while.”[2]
And in the 27th canto, Beatrice, standing on the ninth heaven, points to the circumference, or primum mobile, of Aristotle (see above, p. 136), and discourses to Dante in the following thoroughly Aristotelian terms:—
