Che fosti in terra per noi crucifisso!
This is well explained by Mr. Taylor. “With Dante,” he says,[171] “the pagan antique represented much that was philosophically true, if not veritably divine. In his mind, apparently, the heathen good stood for the Christian good, and the conflict of the heathen deities with Titan monsters[172] symbolised, if indeed it did not continue to make part of, the Christian struggle against the power of sin.”
This principle may be regarded as being, in a way, the mediaeval analogue of our broad modern conceptions derived from a comparative study of religions.
(4) But supreme among the influences derived by the Middle Ages from classical antiquity is the philosophy of Aristotle, which holds the next place to Scripture alike in the “Summa” of Thomas Aquinas, and in the Divina Commedia of Dante.
Mediaeval Christianity drew its knowledge of Aristotelian philosophy from Mohammedan sources. The great Arab scientists and philosophers of mediaeval times, represented in the Commedia by Avicenna and—
Averroìs che il gran comento feo[173]
(his commentary on Aristotle was translated into Latin about 1250), gave back, in a modified form, to Western Europe, the works of the Philosopher, of which the original Greek was not acquired by them till several centuries later.
This Graeco-Arabian philosophy forms the basis of those constantly recurring, and to many of us rather tiresome, astronomical excursions which form so characteristic a feature of the Divine Comedy.
This form of Aristotelianism plays an immense part in the scholastic philosophy; and his deference to it is among Dante’s chief claims to be representative of the religious thought and teaching of his day.