Foster, Kenelm. “The Celebration of Order: Paradiso X.” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society 90, no. 90 (1972): 109–24.

Excerpt:

Let me begin with the concept of beauty, which the old philosophers defined in terms of three properties: wholeness (integritas), due proportion, and a certain “clarity” or radiance.1 And that was how Dante thought of beauty, but it is relevant to note in his allusions to it a stress on the second factor, the interrelation of parts in a whole. Thus in the Convivio (i, v, 13) we read: “A thing is called beautiful the parts of which answer to one another in a right sort of way, so as to make a pleasing harmony. Thus a man seems beautiful if his limbs are well-proportioned, and we call a song beautiful when the voices producing it are interrelated as art requires they should be.”2 Here beauty is associated with art, and this too is relevant to my theme, as we shall see. But still more so is the stress on proportion, harmony, intrinsic order; for I find in the idea behind these terms the key to the long and intricate section of the Paradiso which begins at Canto x and continues to Canto xiv, and describes the heaven of the Sun.

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