mountain in the far south. It is called Mons Caldicus by Albertus,' and Mons Malcus by Roger Bacon, who places it in India. The view that this mountain, identified by the Christian Schoolmen with the seat of the Earthly Paradise, is an island antipodal to Jerusalem in the middle of the Southern Ocean (Purg. iv. 70), was due entirely, it would seem,3 to Dante's own "scientific imagination" or " mythopoeic faculty." According to the doctrine of Orosius, generally accepted in Dante's time, there is no land at all in the southern hemisphere. If there were land, its inhabitants would be cut off from those of the orbis notus-the unity and continuity of the human race, postulated by the command, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature," would not exist. The ideal of one Church and one Empire (and one Aristotelian Philosophy, as Dante adds in the Convivio, iv. 6) requires the geographical condition of one continuous oikovμévn. Dante's antipodal island, however, being peopled only by the souls of the departed, is in no way inconsistent with the teleological geography of Orosiusindeed, is made, with consummate art, to corroborate it; for the cause which produced the solitary island of Purgatory in οἰκουμένη. 1 Meteor, ii. 2. 7. Cf. Schmidt, Cosm. d. Dante, p. 23. Op. Maj. pp. 192, 195, ed. princ. Jebb, London. 3 See Scartazzini's Companion to Dante, p. 419, Butler's Eng. Transl. It is, however, an island in the Exeter Book (an Anthology of Anglo-Saxon Poetry given to the Library of Exeter Cathedral by Leofric, first Bishop of Exeter, 1050-1071): see Exeter Book, edited by Israel Gollancz for the Early English Text Society, 1895, poem on the "Phoenix," pp. 200 ff.: "The Earthly Paradise is in eastern parts... it is all plain . . . is an island. . . There the door of Heaven's Realm is oft-times opened. It is green and flowery. There is no rain there, nor snow nor frost nor fire. It is neither too hot nor too cold. plain (which is quite smooth) is higher than any mountain by 12 fathom measures. It escaped the flood. . . It shall abide perennially blooming till the Day of Judgment. Water falls not there, but rises from the turf in the midst of the forest each month of the year, and irrigates the grove [we are reminded of Dante's Lethe and Eunoè]. The beautiful grove is inhabited by the Phoenix "-which the Poet then goes on to describe. The It ought to be mentioned that Claudian (Idyll. i. 1. Phoenix) makes "the Earthly Paradise" an island :— Oceani summo circumfluus aequore lucus Trans Indos Eurumque viret. . . Mr. Toynbee, however, thinks it doubtful whether Dante had any acquaintance with Claudian (see Dante Dict. art. "Claudianus"). Benvenuto da Imola, in his Commentary on the Divina Commedia, quotes Claudian several times, describing him, erroneously, as a Florentine; see Mr. Toynbee's Index of Authors quoted by Benv. da Imola in his Commentary on the D. C. (Annual Report of the Dante Society, Cambridge, Mass., 1901). 4 Orosius, Hist. adv. paganos, i. 2, §§ 87-89; vi. 22, § 1; vii. 1; vii. 3, 4; and ef. Moore's Studies in Dante, first series, pp. 279 ff. the southern hemisphere, simultaneously produced the one oikovμévη of the northern hemisphere. Lucifer fell on the southern hemisphere (Inf. xxxiv.), and the shock of his fall submerged the land which originally existed there, and caused an equivalent amount of land in the northern hemisphere to bulge up above the sea; the Mount of Purgatory, the only land now in the southern hemisphere, having been formed by the material extruded, as Lucifer, with the force of his fall, bored a passage down to the centre of the Earth. Thus does Dante give verisimilitude to his mythology of "the abhorred worm that boreth through the world" (Inf. xxxiv. 108), by making it explain a physical fact, or what the science of his day accepted as a fact; and, at the same time, by means of the explanation, he brings the fact-so important for the doctrine of one Church and one Empire-into clear connection with a vast system of belief already accepted. When the rebel angels-about a tenth part of the original number created-were lost to Heaven, the human race was created to make good the loss.1 The descent of the Prince of these rebel angels produced, at one blow, Hell, and Purgatory, and the One Continent which is the condition of the ecclesiastical and civil unity of the human race. All hangs together clearly. "Science" recommends Myth, and Myth "Science," in one consistent whole. Again, in Purg. xxviii., the distribution of plants in our hemisphere, from a common centre of creation, is explained in such a way as to make the existence of an Earthly Paradise appear the only hypothesis consistent with "science." The wind which Dante notices with wonder among the trees of the Earthly Paradise is caused, he is told, by the rotation, from east to west, of the primum mobile, or crystalline sphere 1 See Convivio, ii. 6: "Dico che di tutti questi Ordini si perderono alquanti tosto che furono creati, forse in numero della decima parte; alla quale restaurare fu l' umana natura poi creata. So also Spenser (An Hymn of Heavenly Love):- But that eternal Fount of Love and Grace, Still showing forth his goodness unto all, In his wide Palace, through those Angels' Fall, Cast to supply the same, and to enstall A new unknowen Colonie therein, Whose Root from Earth's base Ground-work should begin. In this Hymn the whole drama worked out by Milton in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained is indicated in outline. The -the ninth sphere counted from that of the moon. rotation of the primum mobile carries round with it the pure air or aether in which the Earthly Paradise is bathed; and this aether is impregnated with the seeds of the trees of the Earthly Paradise, and carries them round to our hemisphere, where they germinate according as they find soils and climates suitable to their various virtues. Here we have a "Myth," in which Faith, Fancy, and Science are blended in the true Platonic manner. The close parallel between Plato's "True Surface of the Earth" and Dante's Earthly Paradise has been made evident, I trust, by what I have said about the latter. Plato's "True Surface of the Earth" is a real place in this world, physically connected with the region which we inhabit. It is distinguished from our region essentially by its altitude. With its foundation, like that of Dante's Island of Purgatory, bathed in the crass elements of water and air, it rises up into the region occupied by the element of fire or aether—a region which, we must remember, belonged as definitely to the domain of "science" for Plato and Dante as the regions of water and air, of which men have direct experience. Given a sufficient altitude, aether will take the place of air, and beneath aether, air will be as water. This is "scientifically true. It is also in accordance with "science" to believe that the inhabitants of the aethereal altitudes live longer, more vigorously, and more happily, than we, poor frogs, do, down in the mists beside the waters of our hollow. A place has been found-or as good as found-by "science," where the souls of the virtuous may live in the enjoyment of the rewards of their virtue, and in preparation for an even more blessed existence elsewhere. There can be no doubt, I think, that the lofty terrestrial Paradise of the Phaedo Myth answers to the "Islands of the Blessed" in the Gorgias Myth, to the Tà Tepi yn of the Phaedrus Myth, and to the "heaven" or oupavós of the Myth of Er, from which the souls of the virtuous, who have not yet completed their purgatorial course, return, after a thousand years' sojourn, to the “meadow,” in order to journey thence to the plain of Lethe, and drink the 1 Phaedrus, 257 A; and cf. 248 E-249 A, where Toúpavoû TIS TÓTOs seems to answer to τὰ περὶ γῆν, as contrasted with τὰ ὑπὸ γῆς 11 257 2. water of the river, and be born again in terrestrial bodies. The "Islands of the Blessed" were doubtless pictured by Hesiod and Pindar as islands in the ordinary sense, surrounded by water, somewhere out in the Western Ocean;1 Plato, in the Phaedo, is singular in making them aerial, not oceanic. With an art that is charming, he not only gives direct" scientific" reasons for believing in the existence of his aethereal altitudes of the Earth's surface (the configuration of the Earth in its envelopes of air and aether-deep hollows of its surface being compensated for by lofty heights-naturally produces such blessed altitudes), but he also knows how to add the authority of the poets to the reasons of "science," by making his description of these altitudes recall, not only the Homeric Olympus,2 but the Islands of the Blessed as described by Hesiod and Pindar. The original conception, in Greek as in Celtic3 mythology, of Islands of the Blessed was that of an Elysium or Paradise, somewhere on the surface of the Earth, inhabited by gods, in which also certain elect heroes, who have been translated thither, enjoy in the flesh eternal felicity. This is the conception which meets us in Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and the Hymn to Harmodius and Aristogeiton. But in course of time this original conception was modified in the interest of morality and religion, especially the religion of the Orphic cult, and the Islands of the Blessed came to be regarded as the abode of the souls of the virtuous generally. This view is acquiesced in in the Gorgias, where Tartarus indeed appears as a Purgatory or place of temporary sojourn for the majority of the souls which go thither after judgment; but we are left to suppose that virtuous souls which go at once after judgment to the Islands of the Blessed remain there thenceforth for 2 See Thiemann, die Platonische Eschatologie in ihrer genetischen Entwickelung (1892), p. 20. 3 See Myer and Nutt's Voyage of Bran, i. 329. See Rohde, Psyche, i. 69. ever. In the Phaedo, however, the notion of progressive purification dominates the view taken of the Islands or "aethereal altitudes," as well as of Tartarus. For "Philosophers" mansions even fairer than the aethereal altitudes are indicated as the final abode. We are to think, perhaps, of the natal stars of the Timaeus. Finally, in the Republic, where the notion of re-incarnation, kept in the background in the Gorgias and the Phaedo, is so prominent, the region to which virtuous souls go after judgment is, at any rate for many of them, only a place of temporary sojourn. They return from it, as other souls return from Tartarus, to be born again in the flesh. This view of Elysium as a place of pleasant sojourn from which souls, virtuous on the whole, but not yet completely purified, pass to the river of Lethe, and thence, after drinking of its water, proceed to enter into new terrestrial bodies, is that which we find in the Sixth Book of the Aeneid. The view of Elysium represented in the Frogs and the Axiochus, on the other hand, is rather that of a final abode of bliss, into which ceremonial observances secure a speedy entrance, immediately after death, to the soul of the μÚσTηs. With this substitution of the opus operatum for the personal struggle after purification, prolonged through this life and perhaps many other lives, Plato has no sympathy. The view of Elysium or oupavós as still a place of probation he would have us accept as that which, on the whole, will guide us best in the conduct of our earthly life. Taking, then, the "Islands of the Blessed" in the Gorgias Myth, the oupavós in the Myth of Er, and the "True Surface of the Earth" in the Phaedo Myth, as names for the same region, we may perhaps venture to harmonise the accounts given of it in the three Myths, by saying that the souls of the virtuous, after judgment, go thither-some of them to sojourn for ever (Gorgias), some of them for a thousand years, till they return again to enter into the flesh (Rep.), and a few of them-Philosophers (Phaedo), till such time as they have been thoroughly purified, and are translated to still fairer mansions (oikýσEIS ĚTI TOÚTWv Kaλλíovs, Phaedo, 114 c) in the true Heaven, as the purified are taken up from Dante's Earthly Paradise into the Heavenly Paradise. 1 In the Phaedo Myth; it appears in the Dialogue, 81 E-82 B. |