PURGATORIO, Episode 33. A Geocentric Rest Stop: Purgatorio, Canto IV, Lines 52 - 75

Virgil and Dante the pilgrim have completed their first major climb on Mount Purgatory. They hang out for a bit on a ledge to rest. But there's no rest with all these mental gymnastics!

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we explore this passage in which Dante discovers that the sun is shining on the "wrong" side of him and Virgil rationalizes the sun's position, based on the strange workings of a geocentric universe.

Here are the segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:50] My English translation of the passage: PURGATORIO, Canto IV, lines 52 - 75. If you'd like to read along, print it off, make notes, or drop a comment to me, please go to my website, markscarbrough.com.

[03:53] How ironic that a passage with so many mental gymnastics is supposed to be restful!

[06:44] The sun's position is on an ellipse around the earth in this geocentric universe.

[10:48] Virgil's explanation for the sun's position involves a complicated supposition about the sun's position later in the year, when the sun is in Gemini.

[13:47] Dante's successful journey across the cosmos is in direct contrast to Phaeton's failed chariot drive across the sky.

[16:47] Let's begin a larger discussion of the Ptolemaic universe and the beginning of its cracks in the European late Middle Ages.

And here’s my translation of Purgatorio, Canto IV, Lines 52 – 75

The two of us sat down there to rest a bit.

We were facing east, the direction from which we’d climbed,

Because it does you good to see how far you’ve come.

First, I set my eyes on the shore below,

Then raised them to the sun above. I was then astounded

To see that its light hit us from the left.

The poet saw how I was utterly

Baffled by that chariot of light

Which now lay between us and the northern climes.

So he [Virgil] to me: “If Castor and Pollux

Kept company with that mirror

That moves its light both north and south,

“You’d see the zodiac’s rosy glow

Positioned even closer to the Bears,

Unless it was able to leave its old path.

“You’ll have to want to think hard to know how this can be.

Concentrate and imagine Zion

Stationed on the earth in relationship to this mountain

“So that they both have the same horizon

Although in different hemispheres. Then you’ll see that the road

That Phaeton failed to drive, to his misfortune,

Has to pass the one on one side

Then the other on the other side of that horizon,

If you’re able to apply your intellect’s facilities.”