Ulysses’ mad pursuit of virtue and knowledge presumed that an exploration of physical facts can yield an understanding of value. In the examination on love in the heaven of the fixed stars, St. John first asks not what love is, but where Dante’s soul is pointed. To love is to have an aim, a point, a target. It is to value something more than other things and, in the hierarchy of all good things, there must be one that is the best of all. It is from the sphere of the constellations, of which Ulysses necessarily lost sight when he ventured beyond the known world into the southern hemisphere, that Adam reveals that the cause of his long exile was a trespassing beyond the sign. Since language, the logos, is what humans use to discern what is good and what is harmful, it enacts the role of the God of Bible who promised to reveal to Moses “every value.

This part of Chapter 2 offers two definitions of ‘cosmos’ and then describes the latter as a whole containing the largest stable structures composed of the five elements: aether, fire, air, water and earth. It explains the division of the cosmos into the upper or supralunary part, which is made of aether and where things are incorruptible and in regular circular motion, and the lower or sublunary part, where things are diverse and less regular, composed of the remaining four elements, and subject to constant generation and corruption. The perfect supralunary part forms a system of concentric rotating spheres. While the fixed stars all move ‘on one visible surface of the whole of the heavens’, where they keep their position, the planets are simply said to each move in their own orbit, with no explicit mention of the higher number of moving spheres posited by Eudoxus or Callippus. Below the lowest planetary sphere, that of the Moon, the sublunary part of the cosmos begins. It is also organised in concentric spheres, each one dominated by one of the four elements, starting with fire and ending with earth in the immobile centre of the universe. The author pays special attention to the immutable aether that belongs to the causal chain extending from God to all the motions in the earthly region of the universe. In virtue of its physical perfection, the ether is indispensable for God’s guidance and administration of all heaven and Earth.