The Divine Comedy

of St. Luke. Simon probably was one of that class of adventurers which abounded at this period, or like Apollonius of Tyana, and others at a later time, with whom the opponents of Christianity attempted to confound Jesus and his Apostles. His doctrine was Oriental in its language and in its pretensions. He was the first Aeon or emanation, or rather perhaps the first manifestation of the primal Deity. He assumed not merely the title of the Great Power or Virtue of God, but all the other Appellations⁠—the Word, the Perfection, the Paraclete, the Almighty, the whole combined attributes of the Deity. He had a companion, Helena, according to the statement of his enemies, a beautiful prostitute, whom he found at Tyre, who became in like manner the first conception (the Ennoea) of the Deity; but who, by her conjunction with matter, had been enslaved to its malignant influence, and, having fallen under the power of evil angels, had been in a constant state of transmigration, and, among other mortal bodies, had occupied that of the famous Helen of Troy. Beausobre, who elevates Simon into a Platonic philosopher, explains the Helena as a sublime allegory. She was the Psyche of his philosophic romance. The soul, by evil influences, had become imprisoned in matter. By her the Deity had created the angels: the angels, enamored of her, had inextricably entangled her in that polluting bondage, in order to prevent her return to heaven. To fly from their embraces she had passed from body to body. Connecting this fiction with the Grecian mythology, she was Minerva, or impersonated Wisdom; perhaps, also, Helena, or embodied Beauty.”

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Pope Boniface VIII, a native of Alagna, now Anagni. See Note 270, and Note 925.

Dante has already his punishment prepared. He is to be thrust head downward into a narrow hole in the rock of Malebolge, and to be driven down still lower when Clement V shall follow him. ↩

The White Rose of Paradise. ↩

Iliad, II 86, Anon. Tr.:⁠—

“And the troops thronged together, as swarms of crowding bees, which come ever in fresh numbers from the hollow rock, and fly in clusters over the vernal flowers, and thickly some fly in this direction, and some in that.”

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The nymph Callisto, or Helice, was changed by Jupiter into the constellation of the Great Bear, and her son into that of the Little Bear. See Note 1036. ↩

Rome and her superb edifices, before the removal of the Papal See to Avignon. ↩

Speaking of Petrarch’s visit to Rome, Mr. Norton, Travel and Study Italy, p. 288, says:⁠—

“The great church of St. John Lateran, ‘the mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world,’⁠—mater urbis et orbis⁠—had been almost destroyed by fire, with its adjoining palace, and the houses of the canons, on the Eve of St. John, in 1308. The palace and the canons houses were rebuilt not long after; but at the time of Petrarch’s latest visit to Rome, and for years afterward, the church was without a roof, and its walls were ruinous. The poet addressed three at least of the Popes at Avignon with urgent appeals that this disgrace should no longer be permitted⁠—but the Popes gave no heed to his words; for the ruin of Roman churches, or of Rome itself, was a matter of little concern to these Transalpine prelates.”

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From the highest regions of the air to the lowest depth of the sea. ↩

St. Bernard, the great Abbot of Clairvaux, the “Doctor Mellifluus” of the Church, and preacher of the disastrous Second Crusade, was born of noble parents in the village of Fontaine, near Dijon, in Burgundy, in the year 1190. After studying at Paris, at the age of twenty he entered the Benedictine monastery of Citeaux; and when, five years later, this monastery had become overcrowded with monks, he was sent out to found a new one.

Mrs. Jameson, Legends of the Monastic Orders, p. 149, says:⁠—

“The manner of going forth on these occasions was strikingly characteristic of the age;⁠—the abbot chose twelve monks, representing the twelve Apostles, and placed at their head a leader, representing Jesus Christ, who, with a cross in his hand, went before them. The gates of the convent opened⁠—then closed behind them⁠—and they wandered into the wide world, trusting in God to show them their destined abode.

“Bernard led his followers to a wilderness, called the Valley of Wormwood, and there, at his biding, arose the since renowned abbey of Clairvaux. They felled the trees, built themselves huts, tilled and sowed the ground, and changed the whole face of the country round; till that which had been a dismal solitude, the resort of wolves and robbers, became a land of vines and corn, rich, populous, and prosperous.”

This incident forms the subject of one of Murillo’s most famous paintings, and is suggestive of the saint’s intense devotion to the Virgin, which Dante expresses in this line.

Mr. Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics, I 145, gives the following sketch of St. Bernard:⁠—

“With Bernard the monastic life is the one thing needful. He began life by drawing after him into the convent all his kindred; sweeping them one by one from the high seas of the world with the irresistible vortex of his own religious fervor. His incessant cry for Europe is, Better monasteries, and more of them. Let these ecclesiastical castles multiply; let them cover and command the land, well garrisoned with men of God, and then, despite all heresy and schism, theocracy will flourish, the earth shall yield her increase, and all people praise the Lord. Who so wise as Bernard to win souls for Christ, that is to say, recruits for the cloister? With what eloquence he paints the raptures of contemplation, the vanity and sin of earthly ambition or of earthly love!