Questio: structure and content
The Questio de aqua et terra, as it is commonly referred to, is a text on cosmology, written in Latin, whose attribution to Dante is still disputed. The work is the text of a lesson whose subject matter is described as de situ et figura, sive forma, duorum elementorum, aque videlicet et terre (§ 4). The author is alleged to have delivered the lecture on 20 January 1320, in the presence of the clergy of Verona, at the Church of Sant’Elena.
Dealing with a problem discussed several months earlier at Mantua, the lecture focuses on the relationship between the spheres of water and land and their distribution in the sublunar world. Aristotle’s theory of the concentric spheres of the four elements, according to which the terrestrial sphere is surrounded by the sphere of water, clearly ran counter to the view that much of the globe is made up of land mass under water, as is immediately apparent, but contradicted also by Genesis, I 9 (“Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one and let the dry land appear”)[1], which distinguishes clearly between the areas for land and those for water. Making use of the traditional discourse patterns of the questio disputata, and reconciling the theological vision of the world with the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system, Dante maintains that the humps on the land’s surface enable it to rise from the sea. Attracted by a force generated by the heaven of the fixed stars, the land mass invades the sphere of water. As a consequence, the elements mix, resulting in human life. By providing this solution, although he refutes the more markedly rationalistic hypotheses, Dante appears perfectly attuned to the scholastic debate of his time, clearly sharing common ground with the proposals put forward by intellectuals such as Campano da Novara, author of a commentary on The Sphere by John of Holywood, and Egidio Colonna, to whom an important Liber Hexaemeron is attributed.
[1] “Congregentur aquae, quae sub caelo sunt, in locum unum, et appareat arida”.
