Dante's Heavens ~ Essential Reading and Viewing

Go deeper with these ancient and contemporary authors.

Stairway to Heaven

Comments and questions from astute readers on my last post, “Stairway to Heaven”, about the continuing relevance of Dante’s geocentric model of the universe, have prompted me to compile this list of books and videos that helped form my thought over the last few months on these vexing questions.

An underlying message of my previous article (which I only realized when my readers pressed me on it), is that the cosmic worldview we accept as “scientific” is often cultivated and assented to in our collective imagination long before the scientific evidence is ever sought and assimilated. This was true of heliocentrism as it was of evolution, whose seminal propositions predated Copernicus and Darwin by at least a century. C.S. Lewis notes as much in The Discarded Image.

Dante’s geocentric model of the universe may have been ousted the Copernican Revolution beginning in the 16th century, but it is becoming relevant again today as an increasing number of scientists, philosophers, and even historians realize the impossibility and undesirability of separating the human knower from that which is known. From our ordinary perspective and experience, the universe is unquestionably geocentric. This is an epistemological position as much as it is scientific.

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