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Excerpt-"In Dante's own credo, Virgil's lack of knowledge, his inability to accept Christian salvation despite the fact that it could not yet be formulated, excluded him categorically from Paradise--to the Christian poet's unending distress. The undeserved bleakness of this wise Roman's fate is one of the great sadnesses, perhaps the surpassing sadness, of the many that suffuse Dante's epic. Virgil himself wrote, Sunt lacrimae rerum/et mentem mortalia tangunt, "There are tears in things/and mortality touches the mind." With Virgil as his guide, Dante, too, acknowledged the tears in things with brutal candor. "
The Way to the Light
by Ingrid D. Rowland
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Sunt lacrimae rerum
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