Paradiso 29: Saving the Appearances*

In the May 2019 issue of Scientific American, staff writer John Horgan (best known for his 1996 book, The End of Science) recollects how in the 1980s,

Stephen Hawking and other big-shots were proclaiming that science was on the verge of solving the riddle of existence and revealing "the mind of God," as Hawking put it. This possibility thrilled me, but eventually I concluded that science, for all its power, cannot give us a genuine theory of everything. Science is bumping into what may turn out to be absolute limits, and it will never tell us why there is something rather than nothing.¹

"Why there is something rather than nothing" is among what Horgan calls "some major remaining mysteries" which include "Where did the universe come from? How did life begin? How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?" and the "biggest problem of all," "the mindbody problem: how matter generates mind." Horgan, ever dismissive of scientists when they get too grand, concludes that mind-body theories are mere stories; he writes: "but none really solves the mind-body problem, any more than The Inferno or War and Peace do." Interesting that he thinks the mind-body problem might be solved in Inferno and not, as we know, in Paradiso: in fact, in Paradiso 29.

I like this image of science bumping up against a limit. I would call this limit the primum mobile, the first moveable thing, beyond which there is only the prime mover, the unmoved mover, outside of space and time, beyond which there is only metaphysics. Metaphysics is defined in various ways, but perhaps the simplest would be to call it the science of what is, rather than of what appears.

The primum mobile is material but invisible. This was not always so. For Aristotle the outermost, first moved sphere in the nested spheres of the geocentric cosmos was the eminently visible, brilliant heaven of the fixed stars—those numerous, awe-inspiring, pulsating lights—that maintain their relationships with one another in familiar, recognizable figures—constellations—even as the whole vault of the sky apparently moves over us during a single night, perceptibly shifting over the course of a year to present us with different vistas, familiar from years past. The primum mobile became invisible when an additional movement was perceived in the firmament, the one that has gradually shunted the constellation of Aries off of its astrological sign, and off of what the astronomers still refer to as the first point of Aries, the location of the vernal equinox, when night and day are of equal length all over the world. The first point of Aries, which is used as a point of reference in celestial coordinate systems, has now slipped all the way into the preceding constellation of Pisces, while the corresponding opposite point, the autumnal equinox, has moved out of Libra into the adjacent constellation of Virgo. This is due to what is now called axial precession: rotating on its inclined axis, the earth "wobbles" like a spinning top due to the gravitational pull of the moon and the sun on its equator.² It is sometimes called the "precession of the equinoxes" because, as noted above, the equinoxes have been observed to be moving backward (against the daily rotation of east to west) along the track of the ecliptic, which is the path of the sun over the course of the year (thus called because planets risk eclipse only when they happen upon that narrow path; or, in our terms, the plane of the earth's orbit). This displacement of the equinoxes, this slippage of key points of the sun's journey off the background of constellations against which they were first noticed, will complete a full circuit in approximately 25,775 years. Suffice it to say, with Macrobius, that "no mortal's life span is sufficiently long to detect" it.³ Dante calculated the age of the child Beatrice when he first met her as one twelfth of one degree of its movement, based on the approximation of one degree every one hundred years.⁴

The movement...