Page 18 - GALIET DOOMSDAY AND DANTE´S PROPHECY 515: Dante IV

Love and the Holy Spirit in the Middle Ages were universally associated and often interchangeable with Jesus.31 Augustine affirms the Father to be the Principle of the Whole Deity, and the Son, Love and Holy Ghost.
“The Son proceeds by way of the intellect as Word, and the Holy Ghost by way of the will as Love. Now love must proceed from a word. For we do not love anything unless we apprehend it by a mental conception. Hence also in this way it is manifest that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Son.”32
And it was Love or the Holy Spirit that descended upon the apostles at Pentecost after the appearance of the Son. A mystic, universal virtuous Hound, a Christ who will neither feed on the evils nor on the corrupting substances of the world and whose magnanimous nation shall dwell amidst felt and felt:
He will not feed on dross or cash or gelt,
But thrive in wisdom, virtue and pure love Born he shall be between the felt and felt.
Inf. I: 103-105
Questi non ciberà terra né peltro, ma sapienza, amore e virtute,
e sua nazion sarà tra feltro e feltro.
Inf. I: 103-105
Christ and the felt.
Yet, what hermetisms residing within the Hound’s ‘nation’ or ‘birthplace’ beckon to be deciphered? “Nazion sarà,” strictly interpreted natally is improbable: it excludes Dante, his contemporaries and all ancestry down to Christ33 as potential Hounds. “Nazion sarà,” as a utopia, however, blooms towards every earlier possibility: divine, secular and auspicious. The literal rendering of ‘feltro’ or ‘felt’ as ‘lowly cloth’34 or as a symbolic ‘heaven,’ intuitively, fluidly triggers Christ. Christ’s birth-cloth of the humble Bethlehem manger, and Christ’s nation ‘between the heaven and heaven’ as the Promised Land. Famed symbol of the
31 Par., VII, 30-33.
32 De trinitate, III., Aquinas says, “As the Father is the one whence another proceeds, it follows that the Father is the Principle.” Summa Theologica, I, qu. 23, art. I. Noted by Hopper.
33 Boccacio, too, on this interpretation, rejects the Veltro as Christ: “E, oltre a ciò, Cristo non dee mai più nascere, dove l’autor dice che questo veltro dee nascere.” 89
34 Wilson. Prophecies and Prophecy in Dante’s Commedia.
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