Dante's Paradiso: Canto XII

St. Buonaventura recounts the Life of St. Dominic. Lament over the State of the Franciscan Order. The Second Circle.

Soon as the blessed flame had taken up
   The final word to give it utterance,
   Began the holy millstone to revolve,

And in its gyre had not turned wholly round,
   Before another in a ring enclosed it, 5
   And motion joined to motion, song to song;

Song that as greatly doth transcend our Muses,
   Our Sirens, in those dulcet clarions,
   As primal splendour that which is reflected.

And as are spanned athwart a tender cloud 10
   Two rainbows parallel and like in colour,
   When Juno to her handmaid gives command,

(The one without born of the one within,
   Like to the speaking of that vagrant one
   Whom love consumed as doth the sun the vapours,) 15

And make the people here, through covenant
   God set with Noah, presageful of the world
   That shall no more be covered with a flood,

In such wise of those sempiternal roses
   The garlands twain encompassed us about, 20
   And thus the outer to the inner answered.

After the dance, and other grand rejoicings,
   Both of the singing, and the flaming forth
   Effulgence with effulgence blithe and tender,

Together, at once, with one accord had stopped, 25
   (Even as the eyes, that, as volition moves them,
   Must needs together shut and lift themselves,)

Out of the heart of one of the new lights
   There came a voice, that needle to the star
   Made me appear in turning thitherward. 30

And it began: "The love that makes me fair
   Draws me to speak about the other leader,
   By whom so well is spoken here of mine.

'Tis right, where one is, to bring in the other,
   That, as they were united in their warfare, 35
   Together likewise may their glory shine.

The soldiery of Christ, which it had cost
   So dear to arm again, behind the standard
   Moved slow and doubtful and in numbers few,

When the Emperor who reigneth evermore 40
   Provided for the host that was in peril,
   Through grace alone and not that it was worthy;

And, as was said, he to his Bride brought succour
   With champions twain, at whose deed, at whose word
   The straggling people were together drawn. 45

Within that region where the sweet west wind
   Rises to open the new leaves, wherewith
   Europe is seen to clothe herself afresh,

Not far off from the beating of the waves,
   Behind which in his long career the sun 50
   Sometimes conceals himself from every man,

Is situate the fortunate Calahorra,
   Under protection of the mighty shield
   In which the Lion subject is and sovereign.

Therein was born the amorous paramour 55
   Of Christian Faith, the athlete consecrate,
   Kind to his own and cruel to his foes;

And when it was created was his mind
   Replete with such a living energy,
   That in his mother her it made prophetic. 60

As soon as the espousals were complete
   Between him and the Faith at holy font,
   Where they with mutual safety dowered each other,

The woman, who for him had given assent,
   Saw in a dream the admirable fruit 65
   That issue would from him and from his heirs;

And that he might be construed as he was,
   A spirit from this place went forth to name him
   With His possessive whose he wholly was.

Dominic was he called; and him I speak of 70
   Even as of the husbandman whom Christ
   Elected to his garden to assist him.

Envoy and servant sooth he seemed of Christ,
   For the first love made manifest in him
   Was the first counsel that was given by Christ. 75

Silent and wakeful many a time was he
   Discovered by his nurse upon the ground,
   As if he would have said, 'For this I came.'

O thou his father, Felix verily!
   O thou his mother, verily Joanna, 80
   If this, interpreted, means as is said!

Not for the world which people toil for now
   In following Ostiense and Taddeo,
   But through his longing after the true manna,

He in short time became so great a teacher, 85
   That he began to go about the vineyard,
   Which fadeth soon, if faithless be the dresser;

And of the See, (that once was more benignant
   Unto the righteous poor, not through itself,
   But him who sits there and degenerates,) 90

Not to dispense or two or three for six,
   Not any fortune of first vacancy,
   'Non decimas quae sunt pauperum Dei,'

He asked for, but against the errant world
   Permission to do battle for the seed, 95
   Of which these four and twenty plants surround thee.

Then with the doctrine and the will together,
   With office apostolical he moved,
   Like torrent which some lofty vein out-presses;

And in among the shoots heretical 100
   His impetus with greater fury smote,
   Wherever the resistance was the greatest.

Of him were made thereafter divers runnels,
   Whereby the garden catholic is watered,
   So that more living its plantations stand. 105

If such the one wheel of the Biga was,
   In which the Holy Church itself defended
   And in the field its civic battle won,

Truly full manifest should be to thee
   The excellence of the other, unto whom 110
   Thomas so courteous was before my coming.

But still the orbit, which the highest part
   Of its circumference made, is derelict,
   So that the mould is where was once the crust.

His family, that had straight forward moved 115
   With feet upon his footprints, are turned round
   So that they set the point upon the heel.

And soon aware they will be of the harvest
   Of this bad husbandry, when shall the tares
   Complain the granary is taken from them. 120

Yet say I, he who searcheth leaf by leaf
   Our volume through, would still some page discover
   Where he could read, 'I am as I am wont.'

'Twill not be from Casal nor Acquasparta,
   From whence come such unto the written word 125
   That one avoids it, and the other narrows.

Bonaventura of Bagnoregio's life
   Am I, who always in great offices
   Postponed considerations sinister.

Here are Illuminato and Agostino, 130
   Who of the first barefooted beggars were
   That with the cord the friends of God became.

Hugh of Saint Victor is among them here,
   And Peter Mangiador, and Peter of Spain,
   Who down below in volumes twelve is shining; 135

Nathan the seer, and metropolitan
   Chrysostom, and Anselmus, and Donatus
   Who deigned to lay his hand to the first art;

Here is Rabanus, and beside me here
   Shines the Calabrian Abbot Joachim, 140
   He with the spirit of prophecy endowed.

To celebrate so great a paladin
   Have moved me the impassioned courtesy
   And the discreet discourses of Friar Thomas,

And with me they have moved this company." 145

NOTES

1 - 1

The Heaven of the Sun continued. The praise of St. Dominic by St. Bonaventura, a Franciscan.

3 - 3

By this figure Dante indicates that the circle of spirits was revolving horizontally, and not vertically. In the Convito, III. 5, he makes the same comparison in speaking of the apparent motion of the sun; non a modo di mola, ma di rota, not in fashion of a millstone, but of a wheel.

11 - 11

Ezekiel i. 28: “As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightest round about.”

12 - 12

Iris, Juno's messenger.

14 - 14

Echo. Ovid, Met., III., Addision's Tr.: –

“The Nymph, when nothing could Narcissus move,
Still dashed with blushes for her slighted love,
Lived in the shady covert of the woods,
In solitary caves and dark abodes;
Where pining wandered the rejected fair,
Till harassed out, and worn away with care,
The sounding skeleton, of blood bereft,
Besides her bones and voice had nothing left.
Her bones are petrified, her voice is found
In vaults, where still it doubles every sound.”

16 - 16

Genesis ix. 13: “I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a convenant between me and the earth.”

And Campbell, To the Rainbow: –

“When o'er the green undeluged earth
Heaven's covenant thou didst shine,
How came the gray old fathers forth
To watch thy sacred sign.”

31 - 31

It is the spirit of St. Bonaventura, a Franciscan, that speaks.

32 - 32

St. Dominic, by whom, through the mouth of his follower, St. Francis has been eulogized.

34 - 34

As in Canto XI. 40: –

“One will I speak of, for both is spoken
In praising one, whichever may be taken,
Because unto one end their labours were.”

38 - 38

The Church rallied and rearmed by the death of Christ against “all evil and mischief,” and “the crafts and assaults of the Devil.”

43 - 43

In Canto XI. 35: –

“Two Princes did ordain in her behoof,
Which on this side and that might be her
guide.”

46 - 46

In the west of Europe, namely in Spain.

52 - 52

The town of Calahorra, the birthplace of St. Dominic, is situated in the province of Old Castile.

53 - 53

In one of the quarterings of the arms of Spain the Lion is above the Castle, in another beneath it.

55 - 55

St. Dominic.

58 - 58

Dante believed with Thomas Aquinas, that “the creation and infusion” of the soul were simultaneous.

60 - 60

Before the birth of St. Dominic, his mother dreamed that she had brought forth a dog, spotted black and white, and bearing a lighted torch in his mouth; symbols of the black and white habit of the Order, and of the fiery zeal of its founder. In art the dog has become the attribute of St. Dominic, as may be seen in many paintings, and in the statue over the portal of the convent of St. Mark at Florence.

64 - 64

The godmother of St. Dominic dreamed that he had a star on the forehead, and another on the back of his head, which illuminated the east and the west.

69 - 69

Dominicus, from Dominius, the Lord.

70 - 70

St. Dominic, Founder of the Preaching Friars, and Persecutor of Heretics, was born in the town of Calaroga, now Calahorra, in Old Castile, in the year 1170, and died in Bologna in 1221. He was of the illustrious family of the Guzmans; in his youth he studied ten years at the University of Palencia; was devout, abstemious, charitable; sold his clothes to feed the poor, and even offered to sell himself to the Moors, to ransom the brother of a poor woman who sought his aid. In his twenty- fifth year he became a cannon under the Bishop of Osma, preaching in the various churches of the province for nine years, and at times teaching theology at Palencia. In 1203 he accompanied his Bishop on a diplomatic misson to Denmark; and on his return stopped in Languedoc, to help root out the Albigensian heresy; but how far he authorized or justified the religious crusades against these persecuted people, and what part he took in them, is a contested point, – enough it would seem to obtain for him, from the Inquisition of Toulouse, the title of the Persecutor of Heretics.

In 1215, St. Dominic founded the Order of Preaching Friars, and in the year following was made Master of the Sacred Palace at Rome. In 1219 the centre of the Order was established at Bologna, and there, in 1221, St. Dominic died, and was buried in the church of St. Nicholas.

It has been generally supposed that St. Dominic founded the Inquisition. It would appear, however, that the special guardianship of that institution was not instrusted to the Dominicans till the year 1233, or twelve years after the death of their founder.

75 - 75

Matthew xix. 21; “Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, to and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”

While still a young man and a student, in a season of great want, St. Dominic sold his books, and all that he possessed, to feed the poor.

79 - 79

Felix signifying happy, and Joanna, full of grace.

83 - 83

Henry of Susa, Cardinal and Bishop of Ostia, and thence called Ostiense. He lived in the thirteenth century, and wrote a commentary on the Decretals or Books of Ecclesiastical Law.

Taddeo Alderotti was a distinguished physician and Professor of Bologna, who flourished in the thirteenth century, and translated the Ethics of Aristotle. Villani, VIII. 66, says of him: “At this time (1303) died in Bologna Maestro Taddeo, surnamed the Bolognese, though he was a Florentine, and our fellow-citizen; he was the greatest physicist in all Christendom.”

The allusion here is to the pursuit of worldly things, instead of divine, the same as in the introduction to Canto XI.: –

“One after laws and one to aphorisms.”

88 - 88

Buti says that in early times the prelates used to divide the incomes of the Church into four parts; “the first, for the prelate personally; the second, for the clergy who performed the services; the third, for the embellishment of the Church; the fourth, for Christ's poor; which division is now-a-days little observed.”

90 - 90

Pope Boniface VIII., whom Dante never forgets, and to whom he never fails to deal a blow.

91 - 91

He did not ask of the Holy See the power of grasping six, and giving but two or three to pious uses; not the first vacant benefice; nor the tithes that belonged to God's poor; but the right to defend the faith, of which the four-and- twenty spirits in the two circles around them were the seed.

106 - 106

One wheel of the chariot of the Church Militant, of which St. Francis was the other.

112 - 112

The track made by this wheel of the chariot; that is, the strict rule of St. Francis, is now abandoned by his followers.

114 - 114

Good wine produces crust in the cask, bad wine mould.

117 - 117

Set the points of their feet upon the heel of the footprints, showing that they walked in a direction directly opposite to that of their founder.

120 - 120

When they find themselves in Hell, and not in Paradise. Matthew xiii. 30: “Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.”

121 - 121

Whoever examines one by one the members of our Order, as he would turn over a book leaf by leaf, will find some as good and faithful as the first.

124 - 124

In 1287, Matteo d'Acquasparta, general of the Franciscans, relaxed the severities of the Order. Later a reaction followed; and in 1310 Frate Ubaldino of Casale became the head of a party of zealots among the Franciscans who took the name of Spiritualists, and produced a kind of schism in the Order, by narrower or stricter interpretation of the Scriptures.

127 - 127

In this line Dante uses the word life for spirit.

John of Fidanza, surnamed Bonaventura, – who “postponed considerations sinister,” or made things temporal subservient to things spiritual, and of whom one of his teachers said that it seemed as if in him “Adam had not sinned,” – was born in 1221 at Bagnoregio, near Orvieto. In his childhood, being extremely ill, he was laid by his mother at the feet of St. Francis, and healed by the prayers of the Saint, who, when he beheld him, exclaimed, “O buona ventura!” and by this name the mother declared her son to God. He lived to become a Franciscan, to be called the “Seraphic Doctor,” and to write the Life of St. Francis; which, according to the Spanish legend, being left unfinished at his death, he was allowed to return to earth for three days to complete it. There was a strange picture in the Louvre, attributed to Murillo, representing this event. Mrs. Jameson gives an engraving of it in her Legends of the Monastic Orders, p. 303.

St. Bonaventura was educated in Paris under Alexander Hales, the Irrefragable Doctor, and in 1245, at the age of twenty-four, became a Professor of Theology in the University. In 1256 he was made General of his Order; in 1273, Cardinal and Bishop of Albano. The nuncios of Pope Gregory, who were sent to carry him his cardinal's hat, found him in the garden of a convent near Florence, washing the dishes; and he requested them to hang the hat on a tree, till he was ready to take it.

St. Bonaventura was one of the great Schoolmen, and his works are voluminous, consisting of seven imposing folios, two of which are devoted to Expositions of the Scriptures, one to Sermons, two to Peter Lombard's Book of Sentences, and two to minor works. Among these may be mentioned the Legend of St. Francis; the Itinerary of the Mind towards God; the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy; the Bible of the Poor, which is a volume of essays on moral and religious subjects; and Meditations on the Life of Christ. Of others the mystic titles are, The Mirror of the Soul; The Mirror of the Blessed Virgin; On the Six Wings of the Seraphim; On the Six Wings of the Cherubim; On the Sandals of the Apostles. One golden sentence of his cannot be too often repeated: “The best perfection of a religious man is to do common things in a perfect manner. A constant fidelity in small things is a great and heroic virtue.”

Milman, Hist. Latin Christ., VIII. 274, 276, says of him: “In Bonaventura the philosopher recedes; religious edification is his mission. A much smaller proportion of his voluminous works is pure Scholasticism: he is teaching by the Life of his Holy Founder, St. Francis, and by what may be called a new Gospel, a legendary Life of the Saviour, which seems to claim, with all its wild traditions, equal right to the belief with that of the Evangelists. Bonaventura himself seems to deliver it as his own unquestioning faith. Bonaventura, if not ignorant of, feared or disdained to know much of Aristotle or the Arabians: he philosophizes only because in his age he could not avoid philosophy.....The raptures of Bonaventura, like the raptures of all Mystics, tremble on the borders of Pantheism: he would still keep up the distinction between the soul and God; but the soul must aspire to absolute unity with God, in whom all ideas are in reality one, though many according to human thought and speech. But the soul, by contemplation, by beatific vision, is, as it were, to be lost and merged in that Unity.”

130 - 130

Of these two barefooted friars nothing remains but the name and the good report of holy lives. The Ottimo says they were authors of books.

Bonaventura says that Illuminato accompanied St. Francis to Egypt, and was present when he preached in the camp of the Sultan. Later he overcame the scruples of the Saint, and persuaded him to make known to the world the miracle of the stigmata.

Agostino became the head of his Order in the Terra di Lavoro, and there received a miraculous revelation of the death of St. Francis. He was lying ill in his bed, when suddenly he cried out, “Wait for me! Wait for me! I am coming for thee!” And when asked to whom he was speaking, he answered, “Do ye not see our Father Francis ascending into heaven?” and immediately expired.

133 - 133

Hugh of St. Victor was a monk in the monastery of that name near Paris. Milman, Hist. Latin Christ., VIII. 240, thus speaks of him: “The mysticism of Hugo de St. Victor withdrew the contemplator altogether from the outward to the inner world, – from God in the works of nature, to God in his workings on the soul of man. This contemplation of God, the consummate perfection of man, is immediate, not mediate. Through the Angels and the Celestial Hierarchy of the Areopagite is aspires to one God, not in this Theophany, but in his inmost essence. All ideas and forms of things are latent in the human soul, as in God, only they are manifested to the soul by its own activity, its meditative power. Yet St. Victor is not exempt from the grosser phraseology of the Mystic, – the tasting God, and other degrading images from the senses of men. The ethical system of Hugo de St. Victor is that of the Church, more free and lofty than the dry and barren discipline of Peter Lombard.”

134 - 134

Peter Mangiadore, or Peter Comestor, as he is more generally called, was born at Troyes in France, and became in 1164 Chancellor of the University of Paris. He was the author of a work on Ecclesiastical History, “from the beginning of the world to the times of the Apostles”; and died in the monastery of St. Victor in 1198. Why he was surnamed Comestor, the Eater, no biographer informs us.

Peter of Spain was the son of a physician of Lisbon, and was the author of a work on Logic. He was Bishop of Braga, afterwards Cardinal and Bishop of Tusculum, and in 1276 became Pope, under the title of John XIX. In the following year he was killed by the fall of a portion of the Papal palace at Viterbo.

136 - 136

Why Nathan the Prophet should be put here is a great puzzle to the commentators. “Buon salto! a good leap,” says Venturi. Lombardi thinks it is no leap at all. The only reason given is, that Nathan said to David, “Thou art the man.” As Buti says: “The author puts him among these Doctors, because he revealed his sin to David, as these revealed the vices and virtues in their writings.”

137 - 137

John, surnamed from his eloquence Chrysostom, or Golden Mouth, was born in Antioch, about the year 344. He was first a lawyer, then a monk, next a popular preacher, and finally metropolitan Bishop of Constantinople. His whole life, from his boyhood in Antioch to his death in banishment on the borders of the Black Sea, – his austerities as a monk, his fame as a preacher, his troubles as Bishop of Constantinople, his controversy with Theophilus of Alexandria, his exile by the Emperor Arcadius and the earthquake that followed it, his triumphant return, his second banishment, and his punishment, and his death, – is more like a romance than a narrative of facts.

“The monuments of that Eloquence,” says Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Ch. XXXII., “which was admired near twenty years at Antioch and Constantinople, have been carefully preserved; and the possession of near one thousand sermons or homilies has authorized the critics of succeeding times to appreciate the genuine merit of Chrysostom. They unanimously attribute to the Christian orator the free command of an elegant and copious language; the judgement to conceal the advantages which he derived from the knowledge of rhetoric and philosophy; an inexhaustible fund of metaphors and similitudes, of ideas and images, to vary and illustrate the most familiar topics; the happy art of engaging the passions in the service of virtue; and of exposing the folly, as well as the turpitude, of vice, almost with the truth and spirit of a dramatic representation.”

Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, was born at Aost in Piedmont, about the year 1033, and was educated at the abbey of Bec in Normandy, where, in the year 1060, he became a monk, and afterwards prior and abbot. In 1093 he was made Archbishop of Canterbury by King William Rufus; and after many troubles died, and was buried in his cathederal, in 1109. His life was written by the monk Eadmer of Canterbury. Wright, Biog. Britan. Lit., Anglo-Norman Period, p. 59, says of him: “Anselm was equal to Lanfranc in learning, and far exceeded him in piety. In his private life he was modest, humble, and sober in the extreme. He was obstinate only in defending the interests of the Church of Rome, and, however we may judge the claims themselves, we must acknowledge that he supported them from conscientious motives. Reading and contemplation were the favorite occupations of his life, and even the time required for his meals, which were extremely frugal, he employed in discussing philosophical and theological questions.”

AElius Donatus was a Roman grammarian, who flourished about the middle of the fourth century. He had St. Jerome among his pupils, and was immortalized by his Latin Grammar, which was used in all the schools of the Middle Ages, so that the name passed into a proverb. In the Vision of Piers ploughman, 2889, we find it alluded to, –

“Then drewe I me along drapers
My donet to lerne”;

and Chaucer, Testament of Love, says,

“No passe I to vertues of this Marguerite
But therein all my donet can I lerne.”

According to the note in Warton, Eng. Poet., Sect. VIII., to which I owe these quotations, Bishop Peacock wrote a work with the title of “Donat into Christian Religion,” using the word in the sense of Introduction.

139 - 139

Rabanus Maurus, a learned theologian, was born at Mayence in 786, and died at Winfel, in the same neighborhood, in 856. He studied first at the abbey of Fulda, and then at St. Martin's of Tours, under the celebrated Alcuin. He became a teacher at Fulda, then Abbot, then Bishop of Mayence. He left behind him works that fill six folios. One of them is entitled “The Universe, or a Book about All Things”; but they chiefly consist of homilies, and commentaries on the Bible.

140 - 140

This distinguished mystic and enthusiast of the twelfth century was born in 1130 at the village of Celio, near Cosenza in Calabria, on the river Busento, in whose bed the remains of Attila were buried. A part of his youth was passed at Naples, where his father held some office in the court of King Roger; but from the temptations of this gay capital he escaped, and, like St. Francis, renouncing the world, gave himself up to monastic life.

“A tender and religious soul,” says Rousselot in his Hist. de l'Évangile Éternel, p. 15, “an imagination ardent and early turned towards asceticism, led him from his first youth to embrace the monastic life. His spirit, naturally exalted, must have received the most lively impressions from the spectacle offered him by the place of his birth: mountains arid or burdened with forests, deep valleys furrowed by the waters of torrents; a soil, rough in some places, and covered in others with a brilliant vegetation; a heaven of fire; solitude, so easily found in Calabria, and so dear to souls inclined to mysticism, – all combined to exalt in Joachim the religious sentiment. There are places where life is naturally poetical, and when the soul, thus nourished by things external, plunges into the divine world, it produces men like St. Francis of Accesi and Joachim of Flora.

”On leaving Naples he had resolved to embrace the monastic life, but he was unwilling to do it till he had visited the Holy Land. He started forthwith, followed by many pilgrims whose expenses he paid; and as to himself, clad in a white dress of some coarse stuff, he made a great part of the journey barefooted. In order to stop in the Thebaïd, the first centre of Christian asceticism, he suffered his companions to go on before; and there he was nigh perishing from thirst. Overcome by the heat in a desert place, where he could not find a drop of water, he dug a grave in the sand, and lay down in it to die, hoping that his body, soon buried by the sand heaped up by the wind, would not fall a prey to wild beasts. Barius attributes to him a dream, in which he thought he was drinking copiously; at all events, after sleeping some hours he awoke in condition to continue his journey. After visiting Jerusalem, he went to Mount Tabor, where he remained forty days. He there lived in an old cistern; and it was amid watchings and prayers on the scene of the Transfiguration that he conceived the idea of his principal writings: 'The Harmony of the Old and New Testaments'; 'The Exposition of the Apocalypes'; and 'The Psalter of Ten Strings.'“

On his return to Italy, Joachim became a Cistercian Monk in the monastery of Corazzo in Calabria, of which erelong he became Abbot; but, wishing for greater seclusion, he soon withdrew to Flora, among the mountains, where he founded another monastery, and passed the remainder of his life in study and contemplation. He died in 1202, being seventy-two years of age.

”His renown was great,“ says Rouselot, Hist. de l'Évang. Éternel, p. 27, ”and his duties numerous; nevertheless his functions as Abbot of the monastery which he had founded did not prevent him from giving himself up to the composition of the writings which he had for a long time meditated. This was the end he had proposed to himself; it was to attain it that he had wished to live in solitude. If his desire was not wholly realized, it was so in great part; and Joachim succeeded in laying the foundations of the Eternal Gospel. He passed his days and nights in writing and in dictating. 'I used to write,' says his secretary Lucas, 'day and night in my copy-books, what he dictated and corrected on scraps of paper, with two other monks whom he employed in the same work.' It was in the middle of these labors that death surprised him.“

In Abbot Joachim's time at least, this Eternal Gospel was not a book, but a doctrine, pervading all his writings. Later, in the middle of the thirteenth century, some such book existed, and was attributed to John of Parma. In the Romance of the Rose, Chaucher's Tr., 1798, it is thus spoken of: –

”'A thousande and two hundred yere
Five-and-fifte, ferther ne nere,
Broughten a boke with sorie grace,
To yeven ensample in common place, –
That sayed thus, though it were fable,
This is the gospell pardurable
That fro the Holie Ghost is sent.
Well were it worthy to be ybrent.
Entitled was in soche manere,
This boke of whichè I tell here;
There n'as no wight in al Paris,
Beforne our Ladie at Parvis
That thei ne might the bokè by.

“The Universite, that was a slepe,
Gan for the braied, and taken kepe;
And at the noise the hedde up cast;
Ne never, sithen, slept it [so] fast:
But up it stert, and armes toke
Ayenst this false horrible boke,
All redy battaile for to make,
And to the judge the boke thei take.”

The Eternal Gospel taught that there were three epochs in the history of the world, two of which were already passed, and the third about to begin. The first was that of the Old Testament, or the reign of the Father; the second, that of the New Testament, or the reign of the Son; and the third, that of Love, or the reign of the Holy Spirit. To use his own words, as quoted by Rousselot, Hist. de l'Évang. Éternel, p. 78: “As the letter of the Old Testament seems to belong to the Father, by a certain peculiarity of resemblance, and the letter of the New Testament to the Son; so the spiritual intelligence, which proceeds from both, belongs to the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, the age when men were joined in marriage was the reign of the Father; that of the Preachers is the reign of the Son; and the age of Monks, ordo monachorum, the last, is to be that of the Holy Spirit. The first before the law, the second under the law, the third with grace.”

The gem of this doctrine, says the same authority, p. 59, is in Origen, who had said before the Abbot Joachim, “We must leave to believers the historic Christ and the Gospel, the Gospel of the letter; but to the Gnostics alone belongs the Divine Word, the Eternal Gospel, the Gospel of the Spirit.”