THE HEAVEN OF THE SUN.--To mark this higher grade of bliss and knowledge, Dante pauses on his entrance into the fourth sphere, the heaven of the Sun, to sing again of the Creation, the work of the Blessed Trinity, and the order of the Universe, the visible expression of the perfection of Divine art (_Par._ x. 1-21). The Sun is ruled by the celestial Powers, the angelic order that represents the Divine majesty and power, combats the powers of darkness, and stays diseases. Here, in two garlands of celestial lights surrounding Dante and Beatrice, appear the glorious souls of twenty-four teachers and doctors, who illuminated the world by example and doctrine; the twofold work of co-operation with the celestial Powers, which is seen in its supereminent degree in the lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic, the champions who led the armies of Christ against the powers of darkness and healed the spiritual diseases of the Christian world. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great light of the Dominicans, after naming the other eleven spirits of his circle (Albertus Magnus, Gratian, Peter Lombard, Solomon, Dionysius, Orosius, Boëthius, Isidore, Bede, Richard of St. Victor, and Siger), sings the glorious panegyric of St. Francis, the seraphic bridegroom of Poverty, laments the backsliding of the Dominicans (_Par._ xi.). St. Bonaventura, once minister-general of the Franciscans, extols the marvellous life of St. Dominic, the cherubical lover of Faith, the great paladin in Holy Church’s victorious battle where St. Francis bore the standard of the Crucified (_Par._ xii.). Lamenting the degenerate state of the Franciscans, he names the eleven spirits that accompany him; two of the followers of St. Francis, Illuminato and Agostino; Hugh of St. Victor; Peter Comestor, Peter of Spain (the logician whose elevation to the papacy as John XXI. may be ignored in Paradise), Nathan, Chrysostom, St. Anselm, Aelius Donatus (the Latin grammarian), Rabanus Maurus, and the Calabrian abbot Joachim. Lovers of poverty, rebukers of corruption, historians, mystics, theologians, writers of humble text-books are here associated in the same glory, as servants of truth in the same warfare against the powers of darkness. They illustrate what St. Bonaventura calls the broadness of the illuminative way. Each group closes with a spirit whose orthodoxy had been at least questioned. Siger of Brabant, the champion of Averroism at the university of Paris, had “syllogised invidious truths,” and met with a violent death at the Papal Court at Orvieto about 1284. Joachim of Flora, “endowed with prophetic spirit,” had foretold the advent of the epoch of the Holy Ghost, in which the Everlasting Gospel, the spiritual interpretation of the Gospel of Christ, would leave no place for disciplinary institutions; his later followers among the Franciscans had been condemned at the Council of Anagni in 1256.