Читать книгу PURGATORY - Данте Алигьери - Страница 4

TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

Hell is underground, Heaven high above. Where on Earth is Purgatory? No heretics believed in it. Thomas Aquinas called it a fact human reason could not locate so should leave to God. Dante never feared imagining more than orthodox Catholics, and by combining their theology with Pagan science he placed Purgatory firmly where we place Australia.

Greeks and Romans had no evidence of land outside Europe, Asia and Africa, so thought a vast ocean covered the rest of the globe. Their geographers deduced that the polar regions furthest from the sun were too cold to support life, and the equator nearest the sun was too hot. Some wondered if the south temperate zone supported life but were sure this could never be known, as the equator would roast or boil explorers trying to cross. This meant Atlantic voyages could discover nothing good, so across the Strait of Gibraltar they imagined a sign: THUS FAR AND NO FURTHER. Dante decided this was a divine prohibition, because shortly before his time Italian merchants sought a faster way than overland to import Indian spices and Chinese silk. They sailed out past Gibraltar meaning to circumnavigate Africa and never returned.

This enforced Dante’s Catholic cosmography. When God expelled the rebel angels (said theologians) they fell into an underground pit He had prepared for them. Dante described Hell as a conical space, the point at the centre of the world where Satan was stuck like a worm in a bad apple. Matter that formerly filled Hell’s cavity had been expelled as an island-mountain in the south’s ocean, exactly opposite Jerusalem in the north land mass. This was Purgatory, ringed by terraces with steep cliffs between, the lowest cliff surrounded by a coastal plain for new arrivals. Round the low cliff trudged sinful souls saved from Hell by last-minute repentances, but delayed from climbing to Heaven by excommunication. From a cave in that cliff Virgil led Dante after they ascended from

Hell, as my cover design tries to show.