The Harmony of the Spheres and Dante’s Paradiso

This article proposes a reading of Dante’s treatment of the harmony of the spheres in the Paradiso, against the backdrop of classical and Christian views of the earlier Pythagorean notion. Rooted in textual evidence, the study highlights Dante’s subtlety in dealing with an extraordinarily evocative subject that had nevertheless been refuted by Aristotelian theologians and thus constituted a contentious issue in the acoustic physics and metaphysics of the late Middle Ages.