Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/463

 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 413 their sufferings are correspondingly greater. This huge dent in our planet was made by the fall from heaven of the arch- fiend Lucifer. This perturbed spirit seems to have strictly Observed the law of gravitation in his tremendous tumble and consequently came to rest exactly at the center of the parth, and is forever embedded there in eternal ice, with his jhead pointing upward toward the city of Jerusalem. Or, jmore precisely, he has three heads and in their mouths he ^naws the three arch-traitors of history, Judas who be- trayed Christ, and Brutus and Cassius who assassinated (Julius Caesar. Vergil takes Dante on his back and scrambles down Lucifer's shaggy body to the center of the earth and then up his hairy legs in the opposite direction to a long tunnel which leads them toward purgatory. It is situated upon a conical mountain or excrescence in the midst of ocean on the other side of the globe. It corresponds in size and shape to the hollow of hell, and it, too, was produced >y the impact of Lucifer and the consequent displacement >f a large section of this earth. Around it, too, runs a series >f seven terraces, typifying the seven deadly sins, upon which souls that eventually will be saved are undergoing •varying degrees of penance. As Lucifer was at the pit of hell, so the earthly paradise or Garden of Eden is at the peak of purgatory, and here Dante has a vision of his loved IBeatrice. Under her guidance he then ascends through the celestial spheres of the moon, Mercury, Venus, and the 'sun, and has converse with such notables as Justinian and Aquinas, and in the fifth sphere of Mars sees those who had died fighting for the faith. Dante of course believed with Ptolemy that the sun and other planets moved about the earth in concentric orbits. After the spheres of the seven planets comes the eighth heaven of the fixed stars, the ninth or crystalline heaven, or primum mobile, and lastly the empyrean heaven where beyond the nine corporeal spheres is the throne of God Triune and the realm of pure intellect and love. To Dante is granted a momentary reve- lation of this surpassing and ineffable mystery, and with this the poem ends.