In the Sphere of Venus, Carlo Martello explains to the Pilgrim that all material things have both a nature and a purpose, which is reflected through the orderliness of the Cosmos. The alternative would be a collapsing reality, lying in ruins.
The essence of Dante’s argument for a First Cause and Divinity is quite straight-forward: without things having an imbued telos or purpose, the randomness in the cosmos would immediately lead to chaos and self-destruction, rather than order and self-sustainability. And in some ways – this is foreshadowing the “fine-tuning” scientific argument about the cosmos, now 700 years later. Dante simply states that a lack of purpose would not produce “arti, ma ruine” – meaning “not skillful craft, but ruin”.
From this starting point, he then moves on to the claim that if things are indeed imbued with purpose, and the blended qualities of what he calls virtues, this has to be guided by some higher or spiritual intelligences, which are what is being called Angelical Intelligences in this context. And since these intelligences have produced an ordered cosmos rather than destruction and ruin, they cannot be flawed, since that would result in the same fate of ruin in the universe. And this corresponds in many ways with the astronomical precision modern science has found in so many constants and balances at both microparticle- and cosmological scales, that are needed to prevent a collapse and self-annihilation of the universe.
The third and final step in this chain of argument is that these perfected intelligences will by necessity have a source, and this source is then what Dante calls “il primo”, meaning the “first cause”, or what is in many ways his definition of a perfect G-d as the source of all Being. And he ends up with this conclusion, from the simple premise of the necessity of purpose to sustain the material world at all. From the Italian:
Se ciò non fosse, il ciel che tu cammine
producerebbe sì li suoi effetti,
che non sarebbero arti, ma ruine;
Meaning: “If this were not the case [the purpose], the heavens that you now traverse, would indeed produce their effects, that would not have been skillful crafts, but ruins.” In other words, compared to the famous proof of G-d by St. Aquinas through contingency and a First Mover, Dante starts here with the empirical observation of an ordered Cosmos which without a planned structure, is so astronomically unlikely, that one could in practice conclude, that it is zero. It can not have come about by pure randomness, as some scientists today still try to claim as a logical sound argument. And once this premise is founded, a larger cosmological perspective emerges automatically, at a quite breath-taking scale. It would imply that we are somewhere in a bigger process towards something much bigger into the future, and that aligning with Truth, and the Good, will help this process of fulfillment on a scale way beyond our current capacity to understand, but with a thrilling and incredibly generative prospect of meaning and purpose, and a living Universe – which is most likely fundamentally oriented, towards the Good.
©2023 Richard Emerson
Music: "Miserere Mei" by Gregorio Allegri.