Page 28 - GALIET DOOMSDAY AND DANTE´S PROPHECY 515: Dante IV

return. Feminine, even numbers that dreadfully carried infinity’s stigma.92 Modernity’s stigma and its infinite crepuscule: relentless pull to poesies of infernal oppositions and contrasts. Anti-poesies of a homeless God and a homeless Satan: now mendicants begging for a crumb of heaven and a crap of abyss.
Five hundred and fifteen, 515, as manifestation of the scales of divine justice whose pentads, held by God and Christ-Beatrice, counterbalances the symmetries between Inferno’s malebolges and Paradiso’s spheres: the left pentad weighs the dark night of Inferno against the Pentad of reward of Paradiso. Five as half of ten93 in the Bible is often used a small round, spherical number.94 Multiples of five are common in measures,95 in compensation,96 and in administrative divisions of civil and military personnel.97 Five is also a common figure in penalties98 or rewards,99 as in a fifth.100 Hence, five is a common penalty figure in Inferno: Inf. XXVI 4-6, five Florentine thieves; Inf. XXXI 112:14, Ephialtes was bound five times by chains; Inf. XXXI 112-114, Antaeus stands five ells ‘above the pit. Nimrod utters five words in a line shortened to call attention to the number.101
Just as Paradiso is the reward of Dante’s labours as eternal glory in the fruition of God, Inferno is a vision of ills he escapes and the punishment of Satan. Similarly, the Christian Pentad counterbalances the pentads of King Solomon’s temple;102 the five stones King David hurls at Goliath counterbalance the five wounds of Christ; Lethe’s five rivering letters of oblivion are weighed against the five rivering letters of Eunoe’s rebirth. Perhaps Dante saw one level higher, one level nearer: on the antecedent Pentad, he discerned antiquity: Jason’s golden fleece, Virgil’s Hound and paganism’s pantheon of the gods. On the consequent
92 Apparently by analogy to the line, Aristotle, Metaphysica, A,5. Hopper posits, that, so strong, in fact, was the repugnance of the idea of infinity that it may be said that the first-mover principle of limit and unity was the fundamental Pythagorean contribution to medieval thought, since, by analogy, Pythagorean mathematics, sustains the harmonious philosophy of an ordered and limited world. Foster Hopper. Medieval Number Symbolism.
93 I Kings 7:39, 49; Matt. 25:2
94 Lev. 26:8; I Sam. 17:40; 21:3; II Kings 7:13; Isa. 19:18; 30:17; Matt. 14:17, 21 [= Mark 6:38, 44; Luke 9:13; John 6:9]; I Cor. 14:19; II Esd. 14:24
95 Gen. 6:15; Ezek. 40:15
96 Deut. 22:29
97 Exod. 18:21; Deut.1:15
98 Exod. 22:1; Num. 3:47; 19:16
99 Gen. 43:34; 45:22
100 Lev. 5:16; 22:14
101 Inf. 31, 67
102 Many of the artefacts in Solomon’s Temple were placed in fives to the right and left of the altar.
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