The Maanga

In his essay, Gangui says that in the Divine Comedy, Dante attempts a rare synthesis of cosmology, philosophy and literature.  

Aristotle’s cosmos has a geocentric universe where the earth is surrounded by successive spheres of water, air and fire, then by the orbits of the moon, the planets and the stars. Beyond the stars is the Primum Mobile, prime mover, something that Aristotle postulated (in place of Gravitation) that caused all the planets and stars to move around the earth.  

The Christian view of the cosmos had heaven, hell and purgatory somewhere in between and was geocentric as well, as salvation was to be found on the earth.   

Dante tries to unify these frameworks. He keeps the Aristotelian framework, and places hell right below Jerusalem (he got that right). Hell has nine concentric spirals that moves out to the centre of the earth, where Lucifer lives. Placing Lucifer at the centre of the universe must have been quite a coup in the thirteenth century. Dante attempts to explain how dense land floats above water by claiming that land fled as far away from Lucifer as possible to the surface of the earth, anticipating modern plate tectonics by many centuries. Purgatory is a seven terraced hill on the opposite end of Jerusalem, Beatrice becomes Dante’s guide after Purgatory, taking him through different spheres of heaven, identifiable with the different orbits of the moon, the planets and the stars, and finally they can see the Primum Mobile, as in the illustration by Gustav Dore, which devout Dante identifies with God surrounded by his angels. The Cosmos according to Dante is complete, with Lucifer at the Centre and God at the far edge of the universe.   

While I have immense respect for Gangui, whose Ph.d adviser was Dennis Sciama (Stephen Hawking, David Deutsch and Martin Rees had the same advisor), this search for cosmic order in the middle of Dante’s randomness seems a bit unnecessary. As Nassim Taleb says, we must not be fooled by randomness in economics or finance, but should be quite happy to be fooled by it in art. A more interesting view of the Cosmos belongs to another Italian, Giordano Bruno.  

The best essays on Dante remain Borges’s “Nuevos Ensayos Dantescos”, new essays on Dante, where Borges speculates that the entire Divine Comedy is a dream, its elaborate structure designed to hide one thing: the unrequited love of Dante for Beatrice. As he says:  

“Beatrice existed infinitely for Dante. Dante very little, perhaps not at all, for Beatrice. All of us tend to forget, out of pity, out of veneration, this grievous discord which for Dante was unforgettable. Reading and rereading the vicissitudes of his illusory meeting, I think of the two lovers that Alighieri dreamed in the hurricane of the second circle and who, whether or not he understood or wanted them to be, were obscure emblems of the joy he did not attain. I think of Paolo and Francesca, forever united in their Inferno: ‘this one, who never shall be parted from me’. With appalling love, with anxiety, with admiration, with envy.”