Inferno

“O Sun, that healest all distempered vision,

Thou dost content me so, when thou resolvest,

That doubting pleases me no less than knowing!

Once more a little backward turn thee,” said I,

“There where thou sayest that usury offends

Goodness divine, and disengage the knot.”

“Philosophy,” he said, “to him who heeds it,

Noteth, not only in one place alone,

After what manner Nature takes her course

From Intellect Divine, and from its art;

And if thy Physics carefully thou notest,

After not many pages shalt thou find,

That this your art as far as possible

Follows, as the disciple doth the master;

So that your art is, as it were, God’s grandchild.

From these two, if thou bringest to thy mind

Genesis at the beginning, it behoves

Mankind to gain their life and to advance;

And since the usurer takes another way,

Nature herself and in her follower

Disdains he, for elsewhere he puts his hope.

But follow, now, as I would fain go on,

For quivering are the Fishes on the horizon,

And the Wain wholly over Caurus lies,

And far beyond there we descend the crag.”

CANTO XII (#ulink_5e8f41fd-ea07-5c2e-9bfb-8e5d67e171ec)

The place where to descend the bank we came

Was alpine, and from what was there, moreover,

Of such a kind that every eye would shun it.

Such as that ruin is which in the flank

Smote, on this side of Trent, the Adige,

Either by earthquake or by failing stay,

For from the mountain’s top, from which it moved,

Unto the plain the cliff is shattered so,

Some path ’twould give to him who was above;

Even such was the descent of that ravine,

And on the border of the broken chasm

The infamy of Crete was stretched along,

Who was conceived in the fictitious cow;

And when he us beheld, he bit himself,

Even as one whom anger racks within.

My Sage towards him shouted: “Peradventure

Thou think’st that here may be the Duke of Athens,

Who in the world above brought death to thee?

Get thee gone, beast, for this one cometh not

Instructed by thy sister, but he comes

In order to behold your punishments.”

As is that bull who breaks loose at the moment

In which he has received the mortal blow,

Who cannot walk, but staggers here and there,