Microcosmic Poetics:
Sources and Models
The cosmic perspective of the petrose involves the poet's effort to grasp the significance of his difficult love in terms of his relation to the cosmos as a whole. This involves understanding the cosmic forces that impinge on him: he is embedded in nature, characteristically thought of, in me-
dieval scientific terms, as the formative power of the heavenly bodies shining down on the realms below the moon. Astronomical and astrological doctrines thus play a fundamental role in all these poems. But man himself is traditionally regarded as a microcosm—as possessing a structure closely resembling that of the universe as a whole—and in both the Platonic and the Stoic traditions, health, wisdom, and salvation require the little universe of the soul to imitate the harmony of the great universe. The cosmological theme is thus intimately associated both with the need for self-understanding and with the idea that art is a primary mode in which the soul seeks to pattern itself on the harmony of the universe.
We find in the petrose, then, that just as their explicit themes concern the lover's and the lady's relation to the seasons and to the motions of the planets and the fixed stars, so also in their form—as we might say, in their patterned motions—they imitate the cosmic cycles. The imitation of the heavenly bodies in the poetic form is different in each of the petrose; it is by no means generic but instead closely and intricately shaped by the themes of the individual poem, and it is always part of the poet-lover's struggle toward health. It thus constitutes one of the most interesting and significant aspects of these remarkable poems. In order to understand this imitation we must devote some attention to the "scientific" ideas on which it rests.
The hundred years preceding Dante's birth had seen the assimilation of a major portion of ancient Greek philosophical and scientific thought. During the last half of the thirteenth century and into the fourteenth, there was a marked spread of interest in astronomy and the closely allied science of optics. Although in many respects Dante's scientific conceptions were old-fashioned, to some extent the emergence in his poetry of a strong interest in astronomy no doubt reflects the current excitement, and its expression, especially in the Commedia, was certainly facilitated by the growing availability of information: of treatises and astronomical tables, such as the Toledan tables (ca. 1060) and the Alfonsine tables (1272), and of equatories, analog devices for determining planetary positions.
[Ptolemy's] Almagest was first translated into Latin (from the Greek) in c. 1160 by an anonymous Sicilian author, and was followed in 1175 by the very popular translation from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona. The stimulus caused by this diffusion of astronomical theory did not have much effect on astronomical calculation and tables until about the middle
of the thirteenth century, but for the remainder of that century and the whole of the fourteenth there is a flood of new tables and fresh forms of equatoria. This change must be associated with the introduction of the Arabic forms of numerals which first appear in astronomical tables c. 1260 and become standard practice by about 1320.[16]
We assume in the following that the reader has some familiarity with the traditional geocentric conception of the universe:[17] earth fixed unmoving in space, surrounded by the seven planets (in order out from earth: the moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn)—which were sometimes (in the wake of Aristotle) thought of as fixed in a series of transparent spheres, sometimes (in the wake of Plato) as moving in mathematically determined orbits—the seven planets themselves surrounded by the sphere of the fixed stars. Onto the sphere of the fixed stars, which was thought to make a complete revolution once (approximately) each day, were projected from the earth such great circles as the equator, the meridian, and the ecliptic (the apparent annual path of the sun, a projection of the earth's own orbit). All change—all generation and decay—was thought to be confined to the region below the moon and to be governed by the influence of the stars and the planets, and all sublunar reality was thought to mirror to some extent the nature of the universe as a whole, to be a microcosm. Man, of course, was the microcosm par excellence.
It is not our purpose to identify the direct sources of Dante's conception of the microcosmic-macrocosmic relation; variants of the doctrine appear in literally hundreds of texts available to him.[18] The most important sources of the tradition include Plato's Timaeus,[19] Macrobius's Commentary on the Somnium Scipionis,[20] and Boethius's masterpiece, the Consolation of Philosophy; Dante had clearly studied closely the latter two and probably also the first, which was available to him, though in fragmentary form, in the fourth- or fifth-century translation and commentary by Calcidius.[21]
As is now understood, the Vita nuova reveals that Dante studied Boethius—a major channel for Neoplatonic conceptions, both philosophical and artistic—much earlier than used to be thought. We believe that the Vita nuova reveals some further Neoplatonic readings, but clearly neither the Vita nuova nor the petrose reflect the extraordinary effort to master the entire system of scholastic thought that is seen in the Convivio and the Commedia. Nevertheless, the petrose certainly show that Dante had been reading intensively in the astronomical and astro-
logical literature, beyond what is already reflected in the Vita nuova (which reflects al-Fargani's [Alfragano's] epitome of Ptolemy's Almagest, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella, as well as Boethius). The evidence is strong that he was by now familiar with the Timaeus; there is no question as to his knowledge of Seneca's Natural Questions; and he is clearly familiar with the general outlines of the astrological tradition stemming from Ptolemy, whether he read the Tetrabiblos itself or one of its countless epigones, such as Michael Scot's Liber introductorius. He had probably read some astronomical handbook such as Sacrobosco's De sphaera. He must have used an almanac, such as that by Prophatius, to calculate planetary positions. Whether he had read Firmicus Maternus's Mathesis or Manilius's Astronomica is very doubtful. We have not attempted to identify the direct sources of Dante's knowledge of astronomy and astrology any more than of his knowledge of the microcosmic tradition; our quotations will be drawn from the main texts of the tradition and will serve as illustrations.
Plato's whimsical myth of creation in the Timaeus represents the universe as an ideally harmonious and organically unified living being. According to his influential account of the fashioning of the World-Soul (Timaeus 34b–37c), the divine workman, the demiurge, mixed in a bowl equal portions of being, identity, and difference (each already compounded of the intellectual and the physical); he then divided this mixture according to an elaborate set of proportions derived from the Pythagorean lore of the numerical basis of musical intervals:
This entire compound he divided lengthwise into two parts which he joined to one another at the center like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their original meeting point, and, comprehending them in a uniform revolution upon the same axis, he made the one the outer and the other the inner circle. Now the motion of the outer circle he called the motion of the same, and the motion of the inner circle he called the motion of the other or diverse. The motion of the same he carried round by the side to the right, and the motion of the diverse diagonally to the left. And he gave dominion to the motion of the same and like, for that he left single and undivided, but the inner motion he divided into six places and made seven unequal circles having their intervals in ratios of two and three, three of each, and bade the orbits proceed in a direction opposite to one another.[22]
As the commentators have recognized, Plato almost certainly has in mind here an orrery or spherical model of the heavens (see Cornford
1937 74), constructed of metal strips representing, among other great circles on the celestial sphere, the equator, the ecliptic, and the colures (the meridians) of the equinoxes. His circle of the motion of the same corresponds to the celestial equator (the projection onto the celestial sphere of the earth's equator); the motion of the circle of the Same, then, corresponds to the apparent daily revolution of the entire heaven from east to west, whose direction and rate never vary (a phenomenon we now explain in terms of the rotation of the earth on its axis). The circle of the motion of the Other, within the circle of the Same and making the figure of the Greek letter chi, corresponds to the ecliptic (the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun), along which the sun appears to make a circuit, in a year, from west to east—in other words, in the direction contrary to the daily turning of the sky (a phenomenon we attribute to the fact that as the earth revolves around the sun, our line of sight to the distant stars changes with our position relative to the sun, so that we see a slightly different pattern of stars each successive night).
That Plato has the demiurge place the orbits of all the planets within the circle of the Other shows that he was struck by the fact, apparently not well known in his day (Vlastos 1975 36–51), that the orbits of all the planets visible to the naked eye diverge only slightly from one plane (that of the earth's orbit) and are visible within a band (the zodiac) extending approximately nine degrees north and south of the ecliptic. On the basis of this new scientific fact, Plato was strengthened, it seems, in his claim that the cosmos demonstrated the reconciliation of his fundamental logical and metaphysical principles (being, identity, and difference) and that the principle of identity had primacy because the daily motion of the Same swept along with it the motion of the Other. He thus had also devised a way to represent the mediated derivation of the multiplicity of the cosmos from a principle of unity, since the one circle of the Same is united with the one circle of the Other, differing only in angle and direction, and then the circle of the Other is divided into the orbits of the planets, whose changing relative positions, in conjunction with the influence of the fixed stars, account for all the variety of sublunar things.
The circles of the Same and the Other are representations of particularly conspicuous celestial phenomena, and they are the basis of Timaeus's assertion that men are made according to the model of the cosmos, are microcosms. The main likeness between the world and the
human being is that both are incarnate souls; the human soul is a little analog of the World-Soul. This means that the great principles that govern the cosmos—being, identity, and difference—have their counterparts in the human soul, both as logical principles underlying all forms of knowledge and as the principles of the very life of the soul. Since the visible motions of the cosmos are the expression of the life of the World-Soul, its visible circling reveals the circular and cyclical soul-life that sustains the universe. So also in the little world of man, the spherical head corresponds to the heavens: it houses the soul-motions that, at least ideally, are capable of imitating the ordered perfection of the heavens:
The sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest benefit to us, for had we never seen the stars and the sun and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of the years have created number and have given us a conception of time, and the power of inquiring about the nature of the universe. And from this source we have derived philosophy. . . . God invented and gave us sight that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven [i.e., the cycles of the World-Soul], and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed, and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries.
(Timaeus 47a–c [Plato 1961 1174–75])
For Plato, then, all knowledge and all moral, psychological, or artistic harmony not only imitate the cosmos and the Soul that animates it, but also to some extent partake of their nature.[23] These conceptions profoundly influenced all the traditions of ancient and medieval thought.
In the rest of this section we shall examine the structure of a poem from Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae, "O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas," the clearest and most recognizable instance of a form that is derived directly from the passages in Plato we have just been examining.[24] During the Middle Ages, Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae was one of the most widely studied of all philosophical texts. Brilliantly written and shaped, this impassioned handbook of Neoplatonic doctrine had the distinction of Menippean form (alternation of verse and prose). Moreover, many of the poems are among the best ever written in Latin, a fact that by itself would explain the great popularity of the book. The author of a number of important schoolbooks (translations
of Aristotle's organon and Porphyry's introduction to it, commentaries on both, compendia on arithmetic and music) as well as of theological texts, Boethius was the last important Platonic thinker to study at a philosophical school with an uninterrupted tradition, probably at Alexandria rather than at Athens (Courcelle 1948 259–261), and he was fully recognized as an authority by the schools of the high Middle Ages.[25] That the Consolatio was a major influence on Dante's thought from a period at least as early as the composition of the Vita nuova is well known.[26]
"O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas" is the ninth poem in the third book of the Consolatio.[27] The intense crafting of this poem is supported by its exalted tone and magnificent imaginative sweep. It is placed conspicuously at the climax of the third book, in which Philosophia has at least succeeded in raising Boethius's contemplation away from his own narrow circumstances and the vagaries of Fortune to the cosmos as a whole and its creator. It comes at the moment when Boethius grasps the need for the full intellectual ascent and the need for illumination, and although Philosophia is the speaker, she speaks for him. The poem occupies the very midpoint of the work as a whole[28] and is only twenty-eight lines long, so it can be quoted here in its entirety. The O with which the poem begins represents the passionate outcry of the desiring soul caught in earthly clouds and misery:
O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas,
terrarum caelique sator, qui tempus ab aevo
3 ire iubes stabilisque manens das cuncta moveri,
quem non externae pepulerunt fingere causae
materiae fluitantis opus verum insita summi
forma boni livore carens, tu cuncta superno
7 ducis ab exemplo, pulchrum pulcherrimus ipse
mundum mente gerens similique in imagine formans
perfectasque iubens perfectum absolvere partes.
10 Tu numeris elementa ligas, ut frigora flammis,
arida conveniant liquidis, ne purior ignis
evolet aut mersas deducant pondera terras.
Tu triplicis mediam naturae cuncta moventem
14 conectens animam per consona membra resolvis;
quae cum secta duos motum glomeravit in orbes,
in semet reditura meat mentemque profundam
17 circuit et simili convertit imagine caelum.
Tu causis animas paribus vitasque minores
provehis et levibus sublimes curribus aptans
in caelum terramque seris, quas lege benigna
21 ad te conversas reduci facis igne reverti.
Da, pater, augustam menti conscendere sedem,
da fontem lustrare boni, da luce reperta
24 in te conspicuos animi defigere visus.
Dissice terrenae nebulas et pondera molis
atque tuo splendore mica; tu namque serenum,
tu requies tranquilla piis, te cernere finis,
28 principium, vector, dux, semita, terminus idem.
O You who with perpetual reason govern the world,
Sower of earth and sky, who from eternity command
3 time to move and, fixed, give motion to all else,
whom no external causes drove to fashion
the work of fluid matter, but rather the indwelling form
of the highest good, free of all envy: You derive all things
7 from the eternal example; most beautiful, You carry
in mind the beauteous world, form it to like pattern,
bid its perfect parts to fill it out and make it complete.
You bind the elements with numbers, so that freezings may
10 combine with flames,
dry things with liquid, lest the purer fire
fly up or its weight cause earth to drown.
To be the mid-point of triple Nature,[29] to move all things,
14 You attach the soul and diffuse it through adapted members;
and Soul, cut in two, has globed its motion in two orbs,
goes forth to return to itself, turns about the depth
17 of mind, and curves the heavens to a like pattern.
With similar causes You bring forth souls and lesser lives,
and, fitting those sublime creatures to light chariots,
You sow them in sky and earth, and, by a kindly law,
21 when they turn back to You, make them return by ascending fire.
Grant, Father, that the mind climb to Your august throne,
grant that it find the fount of good, grant that finding light
24 the spirit may fix its sharpened sight in You.
Shake off the clouds and weight of earthly matter
and flash forth with your splendor; for You are the clear sky,
You are the peaceful rest of the just, to see You the goal,
the Beginning, the Mover, the Guide, the Path, the End,
28 the Same.[30]
"O qui perpetua" was widely studied out of context because it gives a succinct summary of some of the central doctrines of Plato's Timaeus, in a Neoplatonic version that was particularly congenial to medieval Christian thinkers, treating Plato's demiurge (not given a name by Plato, and of unclear status in his account) as the one transcendent God,
who not only made the universe but also maintains it continuously in being. The poem was frequently used as a school text and was often the subject of commentary; in manuscripts it is often found, with commentary, without the rest of the Consolatio.[31] It is well known that Dante echoes it a number of times in the Commedia.[32]
Klingner (1921) derived the form of "O qui perpetua" from the traditional three-part structure of Greek and Roman hymns:[33]epikléseis, or invocations (1–6); aretalogía, or enumeration of the deeds of the deity (6–21); and euchaí, or petitions (22–26).[34] Although most of Klingner's discussion concerns questions of doctrine and sources, in a final section he points out that lines 26–28 (from "tu namque serenum" on) have no counterpart in pagan hymns, which without exception end with the petitions, but stem rather from Jewish and Christian tradition, as in the conclusion of the Gloria (". . . miserere nobis. Quoniam tu solus sanctus, tu solus dominus, tu solus altissimus . . .") or of the Lord's Prayer.[35] The relation of the poem to the traditional pagan hymn seems to us indisputable,[36] but the division by subject matter does not quite coincide with the divisions Klingner asserts (thus the poem invites several alternate modes of division).
In subject matter the three parts are as follows: the first (lines 1–9) deals with the transcendence of God and with the causes of his creating the world. God is unmoved in eternity and though fixed himself, he moves all things (this notion, as Scheible [1972 102–104] points out, derives from Aristotle's unmoved Mover); his fashioning of the world was motivated solely by his supreme goodness (Timaeus 29e); he fashioned the world according to the eternal Ideas (29a, 37a–38a); the world is complete and perfect (33b, 37d). Actually, these lines descend through the logical hierarchy of causes. First, logically and causally prior, comes the final cause, the reason for the creation (insita summi / forma boni ); next comes the formal cause, the eternal pattern according to which the world is fashioned (cuncta superno / ducis ab exemplo ); then the focus becomes God as efficient cause ( formans ). The material cause is not omitted; it appears at the beginning of the next section (elementa ).
The second part (lines 10–21) describes the structure of the world: first the relation among the elements (10–12), which are joined indissolubly by numerical proportion (Timaeus 31b–32c, 69a); second the World-Soul (13–17), incarnate in the world (13–14; Timaeus 34a, 36d–e), divided into the two motions of the Same and the Other (15; Timaeus 36b–c), by which it revolves on itself in perfect circularity and
so turns the heavens, which are its image (16–17; Timaeus 36d–37b); third the lesser souls sown (Timaeus 41d, 42d) in chariots (41e) through earth and sky (these are human souls), whom the inborn principle of soul, fiery (40a, 45b), causes to turn back toward the Creator (18–21; Timaeus 41c).
The third part of the poem (lines 22–28) is a prayer to the Creator that the mind may ascend to the vision of him, phrased as if the ascent had three stages: conscendere sedem (to ascend to your seat), fontem lustrare boni (to find the fountain of good), in te . . . defigere visus (to fix the eye of the mind in you).[37] One may say that the first three lines of the final section take us from below all the way to the goal, while the last four resituate us as being below and needing illumination among the clouds and weight of the earthly, setting the goal as at the other extreme (clouds versus the sky beyond). But we can distinguish more sharply: lines 25–26 treat the two extremes as separated; with requies and finis (line 27), motion toward the goal is introduced.
The function of the very last line of the poem is complex. Rhetorically it is a restatement, a recapitulation of the statement of the entire poem.[38] As the poem begins with the apostrophic naming of God as Creator ("O qui . . ."), so its last line consists of a series of names for him. These names recapitulate the entire cycle of the procession of all things from God and their return to him that the poem has described. They go from God as beginning to God as end; indeed, they have a logical order beyond that: motion precedes the guide, after whom comes the path; dux is at the center of the line, at the point that represents the turning of procession into return. The last word of the line can be read in two ways, either with or without a copula—or, as we might say in English, either with or without capitalizing same: without the capital, "Beginning, mover, guide, path, goal are the same"; with the capital, "The Same [i.e., the Neoplatonic One] is beginning, mover, guide, path, goal." The last line thus represents a circle; like the poem as a whole, it is a kind of projection onto a linear sequence, a kind of straight line, of the circle of procession and return.
The poem in its entirety, then, shows how the world proceeds from and returns to God, and this return has two aspects. The more obvious is the one introduced in line 21, the return of souls to God. The other aspect of return is the fact that the universe as a whole is held in unity by its yearning back toward God and its imitation of God.[39] This unity of the world is emphasized in lines 10–17, and it is the unity of a sphere:
first in the proportion that holds together the elements with earth at the center, fire at the circumference; then in the circular motion of the incarnate World-Soul. The same verb, converto (to turn in a circle), is used of the turning of the heavens and the turning of the lesser souls back toward the Creator.
The lines on the World-Soul will repay closer examination. First of all, the World-Soul is "the mean of triple nature"—that is, the principle of Soul is (a) at the center of the world (Timaeus 34b) and (b) between the principles of Mind and of matter: it is the principle that enables them to be joined. Soul, then, holds the world together, and it does so by virtue of its own unity-in-division, its combining of the two opposing motions of the Same and the Other. These turn in perfect circularity and are the life—the unity—of the cosmos. They are the return of the cosmos to God, for the World-Soul looks always to God and is always converted toward him: mentemque profundam circuit. As God forms the world in the image (similique in imagine ) of the eternal Idea, so the World-Soul imitates God, turning the heaven into a likeness of what it sees in Mind:
. . . mentemque profundam
circuit et simili convertit imagine caelum.[40]
Now not only does Soul occupy the center of the world, it occupies the center of the poem as well, it holds the poem together and moves the poem, both in that it is named as the principle of motion, especially of return, and in that the poem expresses the fiery desire to return of one of the animae minores. The division of Soul into its two motions occurs at the midpoint of the poem (at secta, line 15) and in the central line of five devoted to the World-Soul,[41] and of course the two motions are, as line 17 reminds us, made visible in the motion of the heavens (and they are joined in the central region of the heavens, preeminently at the equinoxes, where the ecliptic crosses the equator of the celestial sphere, but also in the entire region between the tropics, where the ecliptic ranges).
The poem itself, then, is a model of the world; not only in theme, in structure, too, it is a microcosm. If the first section of the poem treats God as source, origin of the world, the second, Soul as holding the world stable by its return, and the third, God as goal, it becomes important that the last line of the poem begins with principium, as the first begins with the O , now both a literal instance of the circularity that is the subject of the poem (and the shape of the poem) and an omega, a long O .[42] For, as the last line shows, the poem is built on the idea of
God as both Alpha and Omega. Furthermore, at the end of line 27 we have te cernere finis; here at the end of the poem finis immediately precedes principium, as well as coming at the end of line 28 in terminus idem. The first and last words of the poem show a similar relation: omega (the end) and idem (the Same, i.e., God as the transcendent One, the origin); they even form a significant sentence, The goal is the Same. Like the universe, then, the poem can be regarded as an expansion of the tautology of its first and last terms.[43]
A further aspect of the poem as microcosm is the order of the terms that represent its main focuses. It originates in God, his causality being enumerated in a pattern of descent, and then, beginning in line 10, the description of the world moves from elementa to anima to mens and animus. While there is a descent from the World-Soul to the lesser souls (animas vitasque minores, 18), this sequence of terms as a whole also ascends through the principles that constitute the world (matter, soul, mind). Lines 10–28, then, imitate both kinds of return: the return of souls and minds to the Creator in its explicit argument, the stable hierarchical structure of the world in the sequence of terminology. Even the grammatical case of the various nouns contributes: we begin with accusatives (elementa, animam, animas vitasque ) for the objects of creation but move to the dative (of the recipient of a gift—menti ) when the mind prays to be granted ascent, and it contributes a slight but effective nuance that when the mind fully comes into its own the term animus appears in a genitive (of possession— animi ).[44]
The clearly controlled rhetorical movement of the poem is supported by the emphatic patterns of anaphora that differentiate its three parts: First, Oqui (line I), qui (line 2), quem (line 4); second, Tu (line 10), tu (line 13), tu (line 18); and third, Da (line 22), da (line 23, twice), dissice (line 25). The circular structure of the poem involves these terms also, for the anaphora tu (line 26), tu (line 27), te (line 27) leads to the last line of the poem and the idem, which, as we have seen, looks back to the O with which the poem began.[45] The function of the pattern of anaphora is complex, for if there are six complete sentences in the poem (or seven, if one counts a full stop after mica in line 26), each is introduced by a monosyllable, O,tu, or da. In fact, this articulatory sequence itself forms a complete sentence: O tu, da, and each of the articulatory monosyllables (and each anaphoric sequence) expresses the nature of one of the traditional parts of the ancient hymn as discussed by Klingner: O [qui]—invocation (epikléseis ); tu [followed by verbs expressing efficient cause]—actions of the deity (aretalogía ); and da —petition (euchaí ).[46]
It has long been recognized that "O qui perpetua" comes at the midpoint of the entire Consolation of Philosophy, marking the transition between a first half dominated by the traditional negative arguments of the tradition of consolatoria (the fleetingness of worldly goods and the inevitability of reverses of fortune) and a second half concerned with the positive theme of the intellectual ascent to the knowledge of God and his providence (Alfonsi 1942–43). There is an important analogy between this structure of the Consolatio as a whole and the fact that the first part of "O qui perpetua" mirrors the descent of the world from God; the second part, the return to God. Although the accents of "O qui perpetua" are exalted and entirely positive, it is precisely the principle of the descent of the divine power into multiplicity, necessarily entailing the principle of mutability—soon to be defined as the very essence of Fortuna—that accounts for Boethius's misfortune. Just as the principle of soul holds the poem and the cosmos together at their centers, "O qui perpetua" holds together the entire Consolatio; the five lines on the circling soul are the knot that binds all five books.[47]
In "O qui perpetua" we have a particularly interesting instance of the Neoplatonic conflation of grammatical/rhetorical categories with metaphysical/religious ones. A chief informing principle of the poem is that imitation of the ascent in words is already a mode of practicing it. It would be misleading to suppose that the effect on the reader was thought to be merely vicarious. As Plato argued in the Timaeus, the philosophical ascent has as its goal the imitation of the harmonious cycles of the World-Soul, especially through contemplation of the heavenly cycles;[48] the imitation of the cosmic cycles in words governed by numerical proportion was clearly intended to move the soul of the reader to an analog of the cosmic harmony, in a process that unified the soul both in its rational, conceptual theoria of the heavens (the explicit subject of the poem) and in its other motions as well (see Chamberlain 1976 80–84, 91–93). This is of course the intent of the Consolatio as a whole, the motions of the soul at its center controlling the large forms of the work as a whole.