science, religion, metaphor, and history 117then-current ideas of philosophy and theology: Dante’sParadiso, the least ap-
preciated but most intellectually and aesthetically satisfying book of hisDivine
Comedy. Uniting the Bible with Christian tradition and natural philosophy,
Dante’s work reveals how both theology and science permeated the thought of
highly educated people in the fourteenth century. His geographical and astro-
nomical accuracy is astounding: for example, it was no small feat in his day to
calculate the exact position of the Sun at the same moment in latitudes and
even longitudes as different as Italy and Jerusalem. But for Dante, the truest
picture and deepest meaning of cosmos was ethical, not physical: Dante’s phys-
ical universe is a metaphor for the ethical cosmos rather than the other way
around.^13
Dante’s universe was arranged in an Aristotelean series of concentric
spheres, the Earth being the sphere at the center. Above and around the Earth
was the sphere of the Moon, and then, in order, those of Mercury, Venus, the
Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the fixed stars, and the primum mobile. The pri-
mum mobile, moved only by God, moves all the spheres below it down to the
tiny Earth at the center, but it has no depth itself: it is the dimensionless skin
of the entire cosmos.
Dante and his readers progress upward from the center of the universe
(the Earth) through a series of concentric spheres, to the outermost and highest
sphere, the primum mobile. Dante now “stands” at a point on the primum
mobile, looking down at the tiny Earth far below. Beyond the primum mobile
is nothing—nothing at all—yet beyond it is God. And Dante, thrillingly, meta-
phorically turns his head away from all those spheres and the tiny Earth at
their center. Thrillingly, he turns and looks through the primum mobile to the
other side. As soon as he puts his head through the skin of the primum mobile
to look at God’s heaven, a great inversion occurs. Now he can, by looking “in
the other direction,” see “down” through the spheres that circle the Blazing
Point that is God. This direction is down, up, out, and in, all at once. Where
is the Blazing Point? Nowhere: that is, nowhere in spacetime. Everywhere. It
is beyond the cosmos, yet it is the source and ground of being of the whole
cosmos. Dante is looking into a “place” where there is no dimension, time, or
space. Physically it is not the universe at all, yet morally it is the center of the
universe. It both contains and exceeds all time and space: it is everywhere and
everywhen.
In the sixteenth century, cracks in Dante’s cosmos appeared. The religious
Reformers often emphasized the overt reading of the Bible, which narrowed
its meaning down instead of opening it out to the rich multiplicity of under-
standing. For overt literalists, the scriptures must be read as true in every sense,
including the historical and the scientific. The metaphorical was virtually elim-
inated, closing down meaning, and insistence on the overt meaning of scrip-
ture led eventually to many unnecessary conflicts.
The case of Galileo (1564–1642), often a proof text in the alleged war be-