SY.SLOGIN@CU20B.ARPA (05/28/85)
From: Thomas De Bellis <Sy.SLogin@CU20B.ARPA> I'm not sure if you would call this is a mistake, but it has been around for a long, long time. For example, consider the following tercet from the Divine Comedy which was written by Dante Alighieri in the early 1300's. S'el fu si bel com' elli e' ora brutto, e contra 'l suo fattore alzo' le ciglia, ben dee da lui procedere ogne lutto. (Inferno XXXIV,34-36) One might translate the Italian as something like: "If he was once as beautiful as he is ugly now, and lifted up his eyes against his Maker, well may all sorrow proceed from him." (Singleton) Here, the idea of the physical fall of the angel is being subtly exploited. Satan raised his eyes up in pride and has now fallen to the center of the earth. It is easily possible to trace these ideas as references to earlier works such as Saint Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologia which is written during the 1200's. One has to be careful about calling such Medieval scholarship a `mistake'. A lot was written in an effort to analyze the significance of certain Old Testament acts and to use this information to further interprete the New Testament. It was also common to go the other way around and use the New Testament to interprete the Old. In either event, the allegorical repercussions of a biblical act could be so varied as to make a very liberal interpretation possible, and Medieval work at tracing such supposed intertextual references (particularly in the field of numerology) can make for some amusing reading today. -- Tom -------