Adventures in Medieval Intellectual Life

So, we started Dante's Paradiso last week.

I effing LOVE it.  It is beautiful and serene and challenging and I love it.  It is definitely the most interesting text we've had so far--infinitely more interesting than Aquinas's Summa Theologica, or even Sylvestri's Cosmographia.  Once we got into the Aristotelian era, we moved away from dialectic (which I can appreciate but it's not exactly riveting unless you're watching it as performance art) and into contemplation of Aristotle's vision of the universe--which meant that there were a lot more cosmologies being written and maps being drawn.  And the Commedia is like this times ten.  Just listen to this:

Lift up then, Reader, to the lofty wheels
   With me thy vision straight unto that part
   Where the one motion on the other strikes,

And there begin to contemplate with joy
   That Master's art, who in himself so loves it
   That never doth his eye depart therefrom.

Behold how from that point goes branching off
   The oblique circle, which conveys the planets,
   To satisfy the world that calls upon them;

And if their pathway were not thus inflected,
   Much virtue in the heavens would be in vain,
   And almost every power below here dead.

If from the straight line distant more or less
   Were the departure, much would wanting be
   Above and underneath of mundane order.

This took me a LONG time to figure out.  First of all, Dante-the-character is writing this from a pre-Copernican point of view--he still subscribes to the worldview that the universe revolves around the earth.  Then, he's telling you, the Reader, to imagine something--you can't see it, it's a path (two paths) that you have to plot.  What he's asking you to imagine is where the celestial equator and the ecliptic meet.  They are difficult to explain, and I'm not sure I grasp the whole thing anyway, but basically they are two imaginary paths tracing the journey of the sun across the year, as measured against the constellations (specifically the zodiac--the two paths "strike" against each other because the earth is tilted and this is what gives us our seasons.  Paradiso takes place around the spring equinox of 1300, the equinoxes are the two times when these paths meet.)  To blow your mind even further, Dante-the-character isn't even ON the earth when he's saying this--at this point in the narrative, he's still in the sphere of Mars.  So he's far above the earth, asking you to look up from earth and imagine the plots of two paths that the sun makes over the course of the year--but the sun doesn't make it, WE make it because the earth revolves around the sun!  MIND.  BLOWN.

And for all this messing around of perspective and putting yourself in another's position--he's right.  Imagine if there were no tilt?  No seasons? No autumn, no spring?  And almost every power below here dead. Kind of makes you think of...The spring, the summer, childing autumn, angry winter/and the mazed world by their increase now knows not which is which...The universe in all its glory--"no atoms casually together hurled/could e'er produce so beautiful a world."  I cannot imagine how an astronomer could ever be an atheist--to contemplate the perfect wholeness and order of the universe is to see God.