• Dante here discriminates between the direct or immediate inspirations of God, and those influences that come indirectly through the stars. In the Convito , VII 3, he says:⁠— “The goodness of God is received in one manner by disembodied substances, that is, by the Angels (who are without material grossness, and as it were diaphanous on account of the purity of their form), and in another manner by the human soul, which, though in one part it is free from matter, in another is impeded by it; (as a man who is wholly in the water, except his head, of whom it cannot be said he is wholly in the water nor wholly out of it;) and in another manner by the animals, whose soul is all absorbed in matter, but somewhat ennobled; and in an other manner by the metals, and in another by the earth; because it is the most material, and therefore the most remote from and the most inappropriate for the first most simple and noble virtue, which is solely intellectual, that is, God.” And in Canto XXIX 136:⁠— “The primal light, that all irradiates, By modes as many is received therein, As are the splendors wherewith it is mated.” ↩