the issue of virtuous pagans involves Dante’s guide Virgilio and will be complicated by the presence in the Commedia of saved pagans, starting with Cato of Utica in Purgatorio 1 and culminating with Ripheus the Trojan in Paradiso 20.Dante’s Limbo also houses a few contemporary virtuous non-Christians, notably three Muslims: a general and Sultan of Egypt, Saladin ( Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn), and two philosophers, Avicenna (Ibn-Sīnā) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd).Homer, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan) and philosophers (e.g. Limbo as Dante conceives it houses virtuous pagans of classical antiquity who lived before Christianity: these pagans include great poets (e.g.Limbo came about as a way to accommodate the feelings of the laity regarding the injustice of exclusion from salvation, especially with respect to unbaptized infants.In the Commedia Dante creates two categories, focusing more attention on the first: 1) those who are excluded from the Christian dispensation temporally (being born before the birth of Christ) 2) those who are excluded geographically (being born after the birth of Christ, but in non-Christian lands).Dante’s personal and anomalous conception of Limbo: a radical idea, different from all others in history (see in Coordinated Reading my essay “Dante’s Limbo and Equity of Access,” from which I excerpt the historiographic Appendix below).

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