[14] Isidore, bishop of Seville, died 636; the Venerable Bede, died 735; Richard, prior of the Monastery of St. Victor, at Paris, a mystic of the 12th century; all eminent theologians.
[15] Sigier of Brabant, who lectured, applying logic to questions in theology, at Paris, in the 13th century, in the Rue du Fouarre.
Then, as a horologe which calls us at the hour when the Bride of God[1] rises to sing matins to her Bridegroom that he may love her, in which the one part draws and urges the other, sounding ting! ting! with such sweet note that the well-disposed spirit swells with love, so saw I the glorious wheel move, and render voice to voice in concord and in sweetness which cannot be known save there where joy becomes eternal.
[1] The Church.
CANTO XI.
The Vanity of worldly desires,—St. Thomas Aquinas undertakes to solve two doubts perplexing Dante.—He narrates the life of St. Francis of Assisi.
O insensate care of mortals, how defective are those syllogisms which make thee downward beat thy wings! One was going after the Laws, and one after the Aphorisms,[1] and one following the priesthood, and one to reign by force or by sophisms, and one to rob, and one to civic business; one, involved in pleasure of the flesh, was wearying himself, and one was giving himself to idleness, when I, loosed from all these things, with Beatrice, was thus gloriously received on high in Heaven.
[1] The Aphorisms of Hippocrates, meaning here, the study of medicine.
When each[1] had returned unto that point of the circle at which it was at first, it stayed, as a candle in a candlestick. And within that light which first had spoken to me I heard, as smiling it began, making itself more clear, “Even as I am resplendent with its radiance, so, looking into the Eternal Light, I apprehend whence thou drawest the occasion of thy thoughts. Thou art perplexed, and hast the wish that my speech be bolted again in language so open and so plain that it may be level to thy sense, where just now I said, 'where well one fattens,' and there where I said, 'the second has not been born;' and here is need that one distinguish well.
[1] Each of the lights which had encircled. Beatrice and Dante.