On drawing down life from the heavens

[boccaderlupo]

An interesting through line from the Paradiso back to Plato's Timaeus: In his address to the reader in Canto XXII, Dante invokes the stars from which his genius flows, and this calls to mind the action of the Demiurge, who sows the myriad human souls in their respective stars. It is left for the "younger" gods to create the bodies these souls will inhabit, and then, if after living a life of appropriate virtue, those souls will return to these happy stars once again after their bodily death (else they will undergo a process of reincarnation, giving them additional chances to get things right).

Back to the Paradiso, Dante subsequently turns to survey the planets below, using explicitly mythological language to characterize them. It is in this correspondence, perhaps, that we find another clue to Dante's syncretism: In Dante's association of the Almighty with the "Demiurge" (whether this is accurate or not), there remains space, as it were, for a layer of additional celestial gods that correspond to the planets and to nature. This is a hierarchal view, of course, that may not comport with some "hard polytheist" Neoplatonic readings. Whatever we think of such a synthesis, it may be the philosophical grounding that allows Dante to more or less comfortably nest classical myths, for which he has a clear affinity, within the Christian worldview.

Indeed, earlier, in Canto IV, Beatrice specifically refers to the Timaeus, qualifying however that the sense of returning to a particular star contradicts what Dante is observing as he passes through the heavens. She goes on to indicate, though, that the Platonic conception may be closer to the truth if not taken literally.

To clarify, I'm no Dante scholar by any means, and not trying to say Dante read Plato directly, but rather that certain Platonic ideas may have filtered down into the work. As a reference, an interesting 1911 article on the philosophical aspects of Dante by Roger Theodore Lafferty.