Arts
In today's episode, we begin by looking at cosmology and the medieval synthesis of science with Christian truth in Dante's Divine Comedy. We do so by looking at some pictorial representations of Dante's cosmology in order to be able to visualize Dante's integration of small and, to the modern mind, discrete fields of knowledge. We make it clear that this must be understood allegorically. We conclude this episode by discussing that it is love that moves what appears in the visual portrait to be a static thing. Love is the organizing principle of the whole of the Divine Comedy, and Primal Love, Dante explains, is what organizes the various layers of Dante's portrait of Hell. It is the perversion of God's charitable love (charity) that results in variations of lust (cupidity), which are thereafter justly punished in Hell.