The celestial bodies that governed the spheres were made of an altogether different, ethereal substance each heavenly sphere becomes more perfect as Dante travels closer to the highest heaven, the sphere known as the Empyrean where God resides. Divinity and perfection were reserved for the celestial spheres - the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the fixed stars - with the sphere of the moon being the lowest and least perfect. Aristotle consigned everything that is corruptible and imperfect to the sub lunar realm, the region of the universe inhabited by the people and the animals of the Earth. While the Pythagoreans established the sphere as a perfect, if not divine shape, Aristotle synthesized earlier conceptions of the heavens into a cosmology congruent with his physical laws.
JUPITER HELL CONCEPTS SERIES
Dante's notion of a corruptible and ever-changing earth surrounded by a series of immutable, nested crystalline spheres whose perfection increased with their distance Earth, was derived from the Greek philosophic tradition. The importance of astronomy for Dante is evidenced by the many astronomical references in the Divine Comedy.ĭante's Heaven and Hell are Aristotelian in nature and form. In the Convivio Dante proclaims the nobility of astronomy as a science, praising its "high and noble subject, which regards the movement of heaven, and high and noble because of its certainty, as coming from a most perfect and regular principle" (Convivio, Bk. In the Middle Ages astronomy was one of the seven liberal arts along with grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, and music.
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