Note 179 — PART II THE DIVINE COMEDY COMPARED WITH OTHER MOSLEM LEGENDS ON THE AFTER-LIFE

St. Thomas finds no precise topography of hell in Christian tradition and can only record the probable opinion of the theologians that “ignis inferni est sub terra,” though formerly he had accepted the statement of St. Augustine: “In qua parte mundi infernus sit, scire neminem arbitror” and of St. Gregory, “Hac de re temere definire nihil audeo” (cf. Summa Theol. Supplementum tertiae partis, q. 97, art. 7). St. Isidore of Seville supposed hell to be “in superficie terrae, ex parte opposita terrae nostrae habitabili,” but in the thirteenth century this opinion was no longer common. Thus in a Mapa mundi extant in MS in the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid and the Biblioteca Escurialense (cf. Boletín de la Real Sociedad Geográfica, vol. L, p. 207) and attributed to St. Isidore though it really belongs to the thirteenth century, hell is described as lying in the middle of the earth “at the lowest and bottommost spot.” Curiously enough, unlike Dante’s and the Islamic picture, hell is here conceived as being narrow at the top and wide at the bottom; this probably is due to the faulty interpretation of Moslem documents.