Dialogue
Kepler and Dante have just finished lunch in the metaverse. After a good Glen goolie Black at Archer the innkeeper, they decide to go back to their disquisition selecting “Athens porch mode”. They could finally start their walk.
D: So I was saying that in my age music is a discipline integrated in the liberal arts education. The trivium consists of grammar, logic and rhetoric, while quad rivium consists of arithmetic, astronomy, music and geometry. Music is the perfect applied science.
K: What do you mean with “per fect” and “applied”?
D: Music is the unity of all the liberal arts. As you already know, in astronomy you can con sider the dynamism of celestial bodies as music. Pythagoras dis covered a ratio between the length of instrumental strings and tunes . The circular manner of celestial spheres do produce a reverberation, a wind. Stars make a continuous and inaudible sound, you know that this harmony affects life on Earth. Plato considered them in twin studies! Astronomy is about the sight, while music is about hearing.
K: And arithmetic is the ratio of harmonious numbers. Equations
are music sheets. Listen, I am an ardent Platonist and an avid reader of Timaeus. Plato em ploys a theory of harmony in cosmology. Spacing of the orbits of the planets can be expressed as the ratio between two numbers. I attempted to derive sizes and numbers of the planetary orbits from Platonic solids, starting from inscrib ing a circle inside them and inscribing them in a circle, and then calculating a ratio r:R of the radius of the inner sphere and the radius of the outer sphere.
D: Fair enough! I guess that sounds towards the center are decreasing. Lowest notes are originated from the center, be cause Earth is at the center of the universe.
K: Well… I think you missed something. Our planet moves too, around the Sun.
D: Sweet Jesus! Well this makes sense, but I’ll express my rea sons after you. Go on.
K: Furthermore, you know that orbits are elliptical, right? When I got this point, I needed a reason why planets have their specific eccentricities and ve locities. With some mathemati cal processing and adjustments, it is possible to produce har monies expressed by planets. The more pronounced is the el lipse, as with Mercury, the more notes a planet produces; the more nearly circular, as with Venus, the more monotonous it is. See, there is nothing mystical with it. This is just a criteria that explains a set of orbit sizes for the planets rather than any other. The reason beneath this is still a question…
D: Geometrical and harmonic forms suit the hand of the De miurge. The question is not why cosmology is ordered this way, the question is why not in any other. Cicero in his De Re Pub lica cites the music of the spheres in the Somnium Scipion is.
K: Please, go on.
D: This part of the dialogue is the only one considered worthy of be copied by posterity... But thanks to Angelo Mai, car dinal, theologian and philolo gist, to whom Giacomo Leopardi dedicates a work, the entire De Re Publica is brought to light.
K: What is the passage about?
D: Scipio Aemiliano, protago nist of the entire dialogue, reveals a dream that he had in his youth, during a visit to the elderly Numidian ruler Massinissa, ally of Scipio Af ricano, grandson of Aemiliano. In the dream Scipio Emiliano is elevated to the sky, up in the Milky Way, from which he con templates the architecture of the universe and observes the exiguity of Earth; to welcome him are his father Emilio Paolo and the aforementioned Scipio Africanus. According to Macro bius, one of the most important commentators of Somnium Scipi onis, the content of the story is a symbolic dream, an oracle and a vision at the same time. Indeed, it confers an unexpect ed turn to the political re flection that precedes it: the political theme is projected into the dimension of the eter nal.
K: Yes, De Re Publica by Cicero can be considered as the roman equivalent of the Republic by
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Plato, that describes purposes and features of the State.
D: Very good Kepler. Cicero says that the Roman Republic was perfect during the leading of Scipio. This is the reason why Scipio Emiliano is the pro tagonist.
K: And what does he dream about?
D: The eighteenth and nine teenth chapters deal with the “music of the sky”: Scipio Ae miliano is amazed by the sound of which the celestial universe is impregnated by, a music that humans are not able to per ceive: “What a sound is this so intense and harmonious, which fills my ears? ” he asks to his grandfather. Here Cicero gets to the heart or the “knot of all things”: a sound representation of universal harmony that sym bolizes an ideal model of po lyphony within a State on the Earth.
K: I didn’t know Cicero was such a philosopher!
D: Cicero is full of surprises, he is a sensitive man of which interiority goes deeper than what we know about his career. Do you know that there are theories that see Cicero as the author of De Rerum Natura under the pseudonym of Lucretio?
K: We should discuss this another day, Dante. Let’s go on with music today.
D: Fair enough. So in the Som nium Scipionis, his lesson on the music of heaven has there fore implications that are practical and concrete and the proof lies in the fact that Cicero himself takes up this relationship between the harmo
ny of sounds and the harmony between orders in another pas sage of book VI, about a city of a righteous governance: “As in fact in the lyres or flutes and as in the singing itself and in the chorus of voices, a full concert must be obtained from distinct sounds... so from the elevated social orders and from the lowest and the intermediate ones, as with sounds, citizen ship with balanced proportion is in consonance by harmony of the most diverse; and what the musicians call harmony in song, that is what in the city is con cord.”
K: And what does Scipio Afri canus answer to the question of his nephew you told me before? What was that intense and har monious sound?
D: “It is the sound”, he re plies in the chapter XVIII, “that on the agreement of regu lar intervals, yet distin guished by a rational propor tion, results from the thrust and movement of the orbits themselves and by balancing high tones with lower ones, it creates uniformly diversed chords.”
K: Brilliant! So the point lies in the research of a balance between the sounds of different tunes emitted by celestial bodies as well as in the diver sity between social orders, a balance guaranteed by diversity itself, since each element plays a fundamental role in the overall plot!
D: Yas! Cicero indeed takes up the Pythagorean theory of music, linked to the Ptolemaic conception of cosmo and uni verse, according to which the Earth would be motionless in
the middle of the heavens. As we said before, this doctrine was born among the Pythagoreans from the analysis of the mathe matical relationships between different sounds with motions of celestial bodies. According to the Pythagoreans, each body with mass emanates a sound that has an intensity proportional to mass and tonali ty, and depends on the speed of rotation.
K: Therefore, the sounds pro duced by planets are very in tense.
D: That is exactly what he says in the same chapter: “Such grandiose movements could not take place in silence, and nature requires that the two ends resonate, one low, the other high”.
K: So this is what you were saying before…
D: Yes. Precisely for this reason higher sounds are pro duced by higher spheres, which are more rapid, while lower ones are produced by slower lower spheres. As Cicero says: “That is why the supreme star orbit, whose rotation is the fastest, moves with the most acute and agitated sound, while this lunar sphere, the lowest, emits an extremely low sound”.
K: Wow, so is from this is point of view that the subdivision of music in 7 tones is originated?
D: Yas! From each sphere de rives the subdivision of musi cal notes into 7 tones, in fact if we exclude the immobile Earth, there are eight spheres, arranged by Cicero according to this “Chaldean” order, which includes Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon.
Therefore, eight would be the sounds.
K: Wait but if spheres are eight, five planets that can be seen by eye, the Sun and the Moon, why are tones 7?
D: As we used to know, two of these spheres give life to a sound identical in tonality. In the words of Cicero: “The Earth in fact, ninth, since it re mains motionless, always re mains fixed in a single loca tion enclosing within itself the center of the universe. The eight orbits, within which two have the same speed, produce seven sounds distinguished by different intervals”.
This distinction can be seen also in Christian representa tions, in which angels are gathered along with celestial elements, in nine chors. This hierarchy was displaced for the first time probably by Pseu do-Dionysius Areopagite, and I have forwarded the same scheme in the Commedia.
K: I see. Well then, the Somni um Scipionis is really what in spired you the most in the cre ation of the Divina Commedia?
D: I was totally inspired by the concept of celestial harmo ny proposed there, putting myself in contrast with the Ar istotelian Thomistic tradition, which I largely followed, since the latter denied the Pythago rean theory. But I am not the only one interested in this matter. Beyond whom we cited before, also St. Agustin works with the aim of demonstrating this point, stating first of all that all those sounds are headed by a primordial music that comes from our inner soul. Not to mention Severino Boethi us…
K: Who is this?
D: He was a consul, senator and philosopher that lived under emperor Odoacer during the falling of the West Roman Empire, indeed he took public service under the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great. He is very famous for his work De Conosolatione philosophiae, “Consolation of Philosophy”, but he wrote also a fascinating work about music, De Istitu tione musica, which is about music.
K: Does he follows our discus sion?
D: Yes, literally. He makes a disinction between “Musica Mun dana”, the celestial music of the spheres that cannot be reached by ears but only by in tellect; “Musica Humana”, which is the harmonious music that mirrors the primordial soul and can be reached by “anyone that diggs deep into himself”, by introspection; “Musica Instru mentalis”, which is the one produced by instruments. It im itates the celestial music and can perceived by ears. What you need to remember is that Boethius too resumes Pythagoras and wants to explain music as a discipline that gathers “ratio” and “sensus”, reason and emo tion, in order to state music as a rational science.
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K: I feel them! I understand now what you meant at the be ginning saying that music is the perfect and applied sci ence. Regarding perfection, Humans have in their inner self and in their own ears the ex cellence of the celestial har mony, and so they design it, because they naturally strive for it. Regarding music as an
applied science, it conveys to the soul that numerical ratio and reasoning of which the uni verse is the wellspring.
D: Very well said, Kepler.
K: Dante, what do you want me to know about your Commedia?
D: oh, right, I was almost for getting our last point.
K: I am listening.
D: Harmony can be considered as the main subject of the Comme dia, along with Love, and the two can be considered as the two sides of a same coin. Do you know what Love is, Kepler?
K: Love is a feeling, a striv ing towards.
D: Love is the law of attrac tion, the intentionality that directs the mind towards its objects, and everything in the Commedia works this way, espe cially the Contrappasso. Love is that that goes beyond the mere imagery and effect-monger ing towards the path of Care, in which we are genuinely thrown daily, living our lives in the World; as Virgil says in XVII 91-92 Purgatory, “no crea ture… ever was without love.”
K: I see that no exceptions are admitted! Even non-living things are full of love.
D: Yes, they are.
K: Existing is about to love and to be loved, in the meaning of projecting our attention, our engagement towards some thing.
D: So if Love is the content, the energy, the main protago nist, then music is its vector, its dynamism.
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K: Its rhythm. As we said before, music is the ratio and the reasoning of which the uni verse is the main source. Love is the core, it is the source that we have not requested for, in which we find ourselves existing.
D: Well, the structure of the Commedia is shaped by harmony: verses, Cantiche, but also spheres, souls, light and sound effects. Each of the latter do contextualize every single Canto and all the three Can tiche differently: music is a journey in a climax, from the foundation of Purgatorio to wards Paradiso.
K: And what about Inferno?
D: As soon as I approached Inferno I had an auditory sen sation. “There sighs, com plaints, and ululations loud/Resounded through the air without a star,/Whence I, at the beginning, wept threat./Languages diverse, hor rible dialects,/Accents of anger, words of agony,/And voices hish and hoarse, with sound of hands,/Made up a tumult that goes whirling on/ Forever in the air forever black, /Even as the sand doth, when the whirlwind/breathes.”
K: Here you describe images and sounds, feelings. Is there any music in the Inferno?
D: No, this is the point. Hell has no time and space for music, because music refers to perfection. Hell is the place of sounds profuse by lamenta tions and weeping of damned souls who cannot even hope for a non-suffering existence, be cause their condition cannot be changed.
K: It’s the waste land. Inferno is devoid of music, the lack of cooperation and the seclusion of each shade’s torment. The place of anti-music.
D: It’s a land that doesn’t conceive hope. It was tough, Kepler… In the realm of dark ness, a song or the sound of an instrument would be a great relief for tormented souls. The only instrument I remember is the horn of Nembrot, a Bib lical giant who sought to scale heavens by building the tower of Babel, of which he was the king. He blew his horn as we ap proached and spoke to me and Virgil in an unknown language: because of him, God confused all languages of the world and for Contrappasso he was sen tenced to speak a language in comprehensible to everyone.
K: Do you think he wasn’t able to understand his own language?
D: I don’t know. But he seemed a very confused soul. His horn was the only way to express himself. However, infernal noises and disharmonies are pu rified by the melody and harmo nies of Purgatory, in which the sweet Psalms are animated by the hope of the souls close to Heaven. I remember as soon as I was approaching Purgatorio the sweet song taken from Psalm CXIII, which seemed to me a healer from the troubles of the Inferno.
K: Why this specific Psalm?
D: Because is the one about the freedom for Israelites from captivity in Egypt. It’s about freedom. Pilgrims cross the sea to the shores of Mount Purgato rio, just as the Israelites passed through the Red Sea on
their way to the Promised Land. Then pilgrims of Purgatory too are about to experience years of wandering on the way to Par adise.
K: So this psalm clarifies the position of souls at the begin ning of their journey and fore shadows the nature of the struggle yet to come. Hence the soul detaches itself from the body and leaves the sin: pil grims in Purgatorio who accom plish their punishment tend to wards liberation, not towards further and infinite suffering.
D: Yes! Purgatorio was a spread of psalmody for the whole jour ney and souls find redemption and renovation singing all to gether: in Gregorian chants, singing all together is gather ing unity in multiplicity and distinction, because every voice has to match the other, finding an inner harmony that blends with the One.
K: Souls in Purgatory are gath ered by Love! What auditory sensations do you remember of this place?
D: Among other souls in the vessel entering the Purgatorio, I saw a friend of mine, Casella the musician, singing a plain chant “Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona,/he began, so sweet ly/that the sweetness still echoes inside me…” Indeed, you have to know that during my own time along with the plain chants, typology regarded to people, there were also Grego rian ones, evangelical, repeti tive, sweet, of which Purgatory is a pure spread, and the Mad rigal ones, idyll chants of a rural setting. This latter was originated in Florence by poets and musicians that wanted to shape their
disciplines in a more lively and slender form.
K: Oh Madrigals! The excellent music that Italy abounds in! It was a very known musical genre in my own time too.
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D: To go back to Casella, his one was a song that made every one forget what they had to do for a while… So the first person I met in Purgatorio was a musician, and that sweetness established a particular tone that no longer left the back ground of my journey. I remem ber also a lot of beautiful in struments, far from those gloomy screams of Inferno, such as the harmony of the organ, the jingle of the gigua and the harp, the tin tin of the bell, the sound of the bagpipe and lute… And I can tell also about the song of a Siren that almost got me while I was asleep, right when I was approaching the garden atop the Purgatory Mountain, but Virgil set in my dream saving and leading myself towards the lady that was to be my next guide, Beatrice.
K: So Virgil, epic poet as well as you, Dante, can be consid ered as the guardian of tech nique, art, and the expression of both, protecting you by being himself the proper func tion of music in Purgatorio. But that sweet state of mind you cited before… was it fol lowing you until Paradiso?
D: Yes. Paradise was the apoth eosis of music. While in Purga torio music was recognizable and classifiable because it was known as part of the sacred repertoire, in Paradiso music became different, more melodi ous, referred to light and movement. I passed from the psalmody, to polyphony, very
different from the monophonic music of Purgatorio. Do you un derstand the reason why I use these words?
K: I can guess that in Purgato rio polyphony had yet to come true because of the individual dimension of pilgrims that were still trying to achieve the en lightenment. Music was still with its single melodic line containing no harmonizations. Pilgrims were still not com plete.
D: Correct. Unity was already made in the chors. Good. In this sacred place words were heard less and less, still com municated but not spoken. I didn’t even need to ask any thing because both Beatrice and the other Blessed were reading my mind. I had to structure a dialogue to exist only to make my readers understand it better.
K: Paradiso is the place of light and harmony, of which Love is the dynamo.
D: It was difficult to describe with words, because I was often completely without them. “Within the Heaven which most receives His Light/I was; and saw what he who thence de scends/neither knows how, nor hath the power, to tell” . Music was the representation of light and dynamism of the Blessed souls. “What I was seeing seemed to me a smile/as of the Universe; for through both sight/and hearing my in toxication entered.”
K: It seems almost a mystic ex perience.
D: It was. Remember the “Musica Munana”? The inaudible and yet intense harmony that filled
Scipio Aemiliano’s ears?
K: There it is.
D: Yes, but then there was the Empyrean. After crossing the nine celestial spheres, I as cended into a large amphi theater, the “Mystic Rose”, in which all the Blessed simply existed in the place intended for them.
K: Go on.
D: Shortly before the vision of God, all sounds seemed to be far away. I had the ardent desire of feeling the pureness coming from that centre, but my “wings” were not suitable to experience such an immense place.
K: Was it because you were still alive?
D: No, it was because I wasn’t ready yet. However, my mind was dazzled by such a shock and I was able to satisfy every inti mate desire I had towards the Almighty.
Dante's speech hesitates for a moment
I could then resemble in an in stant all we have said till now: “Like the geometer, who gives himself/wholly to measur ing the circle, nor,/by think ing, finds the principle he needs;/ev’n such was I at that new sight. I wished/to see how to the Ring the Image there/conformed Itself, and found therein a place;/but mine own wings were not enough for this;/had not my mind been smitten by a flash/of light, wherein what it was willing came./Here power failed my high imagining;/but, like a smoothly moving wheel, that Love/was now revolving my desire and will,/which moves the sun and
Delirium
all the other stars.” That was my near-death experi ence. Then I passed out.
K: Dante, here we find again the core of the discussion and the proper answer to my ques tion about music as the perfect and the applied science… Now, I have another question.
D: Please.
K: Dante, do you think that the Empyrean Music was almost nil because the point of origin of the universe tending to infini ty and the one tending to zero do collapse on each other, that’s why Silence was domi nant?
D: I’ll try to answer you by talking about the Pseudo-Diony sius the Areopagite, the one I cited before on the celestial hierarchy. He was a Syrian monk, author of Corpus Dionysi acum and other mystical writ ings close to Neoplatonism. He is taken up by many authors as the main exponent of “apophatic theology”, also known as “nega tive theology”.
K: In the sense of the opposite of the cataphatic one?
D: Yes, it is the second moment of the dialectic. The first moment, the cataphatic theolo gy, from Greek “κατά”, a direc tional vector, it means “around”, “about”, and “φάναι”, “to speak”, attempts to explain in human languages what God is, with descriptions and meta phors. So then God is Light, is Eternity, is the Good, the Blest, is Justice. The apophat ic theology, from Greek “ πό”, the opposite directional vector, it means “off”, “away from”, and “φάναι”, “to speak”, denies all of these descrip
tions, defining that God cannot be Light, cannot be Eternity, because it is beyond the Being, beyond human languages; some times it almost blasphemously describes God as “the angry bear”, or even “the worm”. Pseudo-Dionysius was one of the few that stated the sacred texts as collected by multiple authors!
K: But if our language is fal lacious, why does apophatic theology use negative terms re ferring to God?
D: Because dissimilar images and terms do intend the exact opposite meaning and have such a shocking effect on our intel lects that are able to reach with greater quantity of truth the real concept of God.
K: So humans are deceived be cause they try to compare their truths with the divine ones, inasmuch they conceive some thing similar to them something that overcomes them. We can’t fully describe God by words be cause we are always with the familiarity of our senses. We have forgotten to look without eyes.
D: As I told you before, while I was in the Empyrean, I could only feel it. The ineffability and the inability of rendering that sensation in human terms was real.
K: So, is Silence the third di alectic moments?
D: Yes it is. The mystical landing of Silence. The best way to talk about God is to affirm and deny something at the same time. In doing so, I am not contradicting myself.
K: Because God is beyond human
conception of Logic.
D: In Pseudo-Dionysius words: “In the house the light from all the lamps is completely in terpretating, yet each is clearly distinct. There is dis tinction in unity and unity in distinction. When there are many lamps in a house there is nevertheless a single undiffer entiated light and from all of them comes the one undivided brightness.” You can under stand now polyphony in the same way.
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K: So then God is the additive synthesis of all the colors of the human visible spectrum.
D: White.
Plato, The Republic, Penguin Classics, 2007
Piero Weiss e Richard Taruskin, Music in the Western World: a history in docu ments, Cengage Learning, 2008
Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Oxford World’s Classic, 2009 Cicerone, La Repubblica, BUR, 2008 Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, Mondadori, 2018 Cicerone, Epistole ad Attico. Epistole al fratello Quinto. UTET, 1998 Andrea Frova, Fisica nella musica, Zanichelli, Alighieri, Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Princeton University Press, 1973. Brad Goodine, Songs of Purgatorio, The Undergraduate Journal of Baylor Univer sity
Graham Harman, Dante’s broken hammer, Repeater, London, 2016 Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Paulist Pr, 1987
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