Celestial Spheres - Literary and Symbolic Expressions

Literary and Symbolic Expressions

"Because the medieval universe is finite, it has a shape, the perfect spherical shape, containing within itself an ordered variety....
"The spheres ... present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony."

In Cicero's Dream of Scipio, the elder Scipio Africanus describes an ascent through the celestial spheres, compared to which the Earth and the Roman Empire dwindle into insignificance. A commentary on the Dream of Scipio by the late Roman writer Macrobius, which included a discussion of the various schools of thought on the order of the spheres, did much to spread the idea of the celestial spheres through the Early Middle Ages.

Some late medieval figures noted that the celestial spheres' physical order was inverse to their order on the spiritual plane, where God was at the center and the Earth at the periphery. Near the beginning of the fourteenth century Dante, in the Paradiso of his Divine Comedy, described God as a light at the center of the cosmos. Here the poet ascends beyond physical existence to the Empyrean Heaven, where he comes face to face with God himself and is granted understanding of both divine and human nature. Later in the century, the illuminator of Nicole Oresme's Le livre du Ciel et du Monde, a translation of and commentary on Aristotle's De caelo produced for Oresme's patron, King Charles V, employed the same motif. He drew the spheres in the conventional order, with the Moon closest to the Earth and the stars highest, but the spheres were concave upwards, centered on God, rather than concave downwards, centered on the Earth. Below this figure Oresme quotes the Psalms that "The heavens declare the Glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork."