Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita - Dante

[Godgrl Gomer]

I have this REALLY cool watch that I bought when I was 16. I saved all my money for it and my mother really went nuts when she saw what I bought. She hated anything to do with Jesus.

The top half of the band is angels. They wear light blue and they are looking down. One the other 1/2 of the band, with the notches, has reddish demons. They have pitchforks and appear to be thrusting them upwards.

This watch has like a Roman Coin Face on it and no numbers. Around the edge is written the words Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.

I saught my teachers at school and I was told the phrase is Latin. She said that it says "No half measures in our life". I thought this was way cool:cool:

I found my watch yesterday and needless to say it is disintegrating a bit...the band is for it is plastic. I decided to look up the phrase.

I have always thought the face on the watch looks like DANTE....
Turns out it is the beginning line of Dante's Divine Comedy....
IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR LIFE'S JOURNEY

Go figure......

Still. Thinking it said No Half Measures in our Life had a profound effect upon me. I began seeking Christ Jesus and found Him 3 years later.;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Divine_Comedy

[TJL]

Interesting imagination that the man has. Strange how that would have once been labeled as Comedy. I wonder how that word changed so dramatically since that time. So is the story thought to be from an Islamic view point of heaven and hell?

Blessings,
Terri

[rossid]

From the Wiki reference above:

"The poem's imaginative vision of the Christian afterlife is a culmination of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church."

[Godgrl Gomer]

Yeah. I was wondering how Islamic influence would enter in at such an early date of writing.

And no...its not comedic as we would understand it today.

[TJL]

Yeah. I was wondering how Islamic influence would enter in at such an early date of writing.

And no...its not comedic as we would understand it today.

In case you had not found it yet in the article that you gave for reading on this topic, here it is:

The Divine Comedy and Islamic philosophy
In 1919 Professor Miguel Asín Palacios, a Spanish scholar and a Catholic priest, published La Escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia ("Islamic Eschatology in the Divine Comedy"), an account of parallels between early Islamic philosophy and the Divine Comedy. Asín Palacios argued that Dante derived many features of and episodes about the hereafter directly or indirectly from various versions of Islamic works: the Hadith and the Kitab al Miraj (translated into Latin in 1264 or shortly before[3] as Liber Scale Machometi, "The Book of Muhammad's Ladder") concerning Muhammad's ascension to Heaven, and the spiritual writings of Ibn Arabi.

The work of Professor Asín Palacios was criticized by many groups, including nationalist Italians, the Roman Catholic clergy and other European Christians. [4] He responded by enumerating the possible sources from which Dante could have obtained the salient features of Islamic eschatology.

The issue is still divisive. Dante lived in a Europe of growing literary and philosophical contacts with the Muslim world, encouraged by such factors as Averroism and the patronage of Alfonso X of Castile. Still, some scholars have not been satisfied with explanations of how Dante would have gained knowledge of particular Islamic texts. The twentieth century Orientalist Francesco Gabrieli, a strenuous opponent of the Arabic theory, expressed skepticism regarding some claimed similarities, and the lack of evidence of the vehicle through which Islamic descriptions of the other world could have been transmitted to Dante. Even so, while dismissing the probability of some influences posited in Palacios's work, Gabrieli recognized that it was "at least possible, if not probable, that Dante may have known the Liber scalae and have taken from it certain images and concepts of Muslim eschatology".

More recently, scholar Giorgio Battistoni has brought to light the role that commissioned Jewish translators working in European circles during the 12th century played in making Arabic texts available to Christianity. Battistoni believes this to be a clear route by which the possible sources of influence may have reached Dante.[5] Shortly before her death the Italian philologist Maria Corti pointed out that, during his stay at the court of Alfonso X, Dante's mentor Brunetto Latini met Bonaventura da Siena, a Tuscan who had translated the Liber scalae from Arabic into Latin. According to Corti, It appears likely that Brunetto played a crucial role in providing Dante with Arab sources.[6]

Blessings my little sister,
Terri

[Godgrl Gomer]

I hadnt gone to look yet. Thanks Sister.....I love you.