Ted Cachey - Dante Talk

This lecture explores Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso as both a poetic map of the cosmos and a deeply personal act of self-mapping by an exiled Florentine. Starting “from the end”—with the poet’s vision of God in Paradiso 33—the talk traces how Dante combines biblical cosmogony and Aristotelian cosmology into a unique synthesis. We will analyze Beatrice’s lessons on the structure and operation of the heavens, the angelic hierarchy, and planetary influences, and see how these inform the poem’s organization and its philosophical and theological scope. Along the way, we will consider how Dante’s cartographic imagination—from mappaemundi to nautical charts to regional maps of Italy—shapes his depiction of Heaven, and how his biography as a politically displaced poet inspires and determines the structure of the Commedia. Special attention will be given to the “mapping pillars” of Paradiso—particularly cantos 2, 4, 6, and 28—and to Dante’s placement of himself at the center of the cosmos he reimagines. The lecture will demonstrate that Paradiso is not only a summa of medieval cosmology but also a work in which the act of poetic creation participates in the divine act of creation itself.