Dante, Shakespeare, and Whitehead: Translunar and Sublunar Modes of Thought

Dante, Shakespeare, and Whitehead

Translunar and Sublunar Modes of Thought

by Jay McDaniel with help from OpenAI

Translunar and Sublunar

The translunar realm was the sphere of the heavenly bodies, the stars and the planets that move in eternal harmony. Below it was the sublunar or material world, a place of chance, corruption, and death.

A. Tripolitis, Relig. Hellenistic-Roman Age vi. 143

Translunar

Existing or situated beyond the (supposed) sphere of the moon; figurative heavenly or otherworldly in nature or origin; spiritual, visionary; = translunary adj. Now chiefly historical or literary.

Oxford English Dictionary, “translunar (adj.), sense 1.b,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7390764602.

Sublunar

Existing or situated beneath the moon; Of, in, or belonging to this world.

Oxford English Dictionary, “sublunar (adj.), sense 1,” September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9776534415.

On this page you find reflections on Shakespeare, Dante, and Whitehead inspired by an observation made by Professor Clint Brand, a scholar of religion and philosophy, during an interview on the podcast Spelunking with Plato. Please find downloads of the conversation at the bottom of this page.

In the course of that conversation, Brand noted a contrast between Dante’s translunary imagination and Shakespeare’s sublunary sensibility, and suggested further that Milton and Chaucer might be understood in similar terms. The distinction immediately struck me as both illuminating and generative. What follows is not an exposition of Brand’s position, but my own attempt to explore the philosophical and theological implications of this contrast—especially in conversation with process philosophy.

Eliot's Impression

T. S. Eliot famously remarked that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.” The claim is intentionally stark, and perhaps deliberately overstated. Yet it names a contrast that has proven remarkably enduring: two fundamentally different ways of seeing reality, two orientations of imagination that continue to shape how literature—and philosophy—approach the world.

For Eliot, Dante represents a translunary imagination: a synoptic vision that seeks to understand the whole, to locate every life, suffering, and choice within a comprehensive moral and spiritual order. Dante’s poetry looks beyond the immediate flux of experience toward ultimate meaning, final causes, and the architecture of divine purpose. His genius lies in seeing the many from the standpoint of the whole.

Shakespeare, by contrast, embodies a sublunary sensibility. His plays remain resolutely beneath the moon—immersed in time, contingency, misjudgment, passion, irony, and moral ambiguity. Shakespeare does not offer a single message or metaphysical synthesis. He presents human variety without reduction, allowing conflicting perspectives to stand unresolved. Meaning, where it appears, emerges locally, relationally, and often precariously.

With their interest in general ideas and large-scale patterns, process philosophers influenced by the cosmology of Whitehead may initially seem closer to Dante than to Shakespeare. And often they are. Process thought is drawn to questions of cosmic becoming, relational order, and the ways in which the many may belong together without coercion. It seeks intelligibility, coherence, and hope at the widest possible scale.

Why Whitehead Needs Shakespeare

A Shakespearean contribution to process philosophy will not replace its translunary insights; it will chasten and relativize them. It will insist that becoming is often confused, improvisational, and morally risky; that divine lures are not always recognized; that freedom frequently misfires; and that suffering is not always redeemed within the span of a single story. It will remind theology that God’s persuasive presence is encountered not only in cosmic vision but in miscommunication, delayed repentance, partial forgiveness, and lives that never fully come together.

Shakespeare offers abundant examples of this sublunary realism. In King Lear, Lear’s catastrophic failure to recognize love illustrates how a distorted subjective aim can have irreversible consequences, long before insight arrives. In Hamlet, competing obligations generate paralysis rather than resolution; the lure toward decisive action is felt but never cleanly integrated into a coherent act. Measure for Measure stages the collision between abstract justice and concrete lives, forcing characters to improvise morally in situations where no option is unambiguously good. And in The Winter’s Tale, forgiveness emerges not as logical closure but as a fragile, time-dependent achievement that does not erase prior harm.

In each case, Shakespeare resists moral tidying. Insight comes late, if at all. Consequences linger. Reconciliation—when it appears—remains partial and costly. These are worlds in which freedom is real but precarious, where the past weighs heavily on the present, and where meaning emerges locally rather than from any governing scheme.

Such drama offers process philosophy a crucial reminder: if God works persuasively rather than coercively, then divine aims will often be misheard, resisted, or tragically delayed. A Shakespearean sensibility helps philosophy remain faithful to this fact, keeping it honest about the risks of freedom and the unfinished character of becoming beneath the moon.

There are, in fact, ample resources within Whitehead’s own philosophy for remaining faithful to the facts of lived experience. They include his ontological principle, which insists that explanation must finally appeal to what is actual rather than to abstract structures alone; his airplane analogy, which warns against mistaking high-altitude theoretical clarity for adequacy, reminding us that philosophical flight must repeatedly return to the ground of experience; his repeated insistence on fidelity to the multifariousness of the world, where no single tone, scale, or value exhausts the real; and his concept of tragic beauty, which affirms that value may emerge not by eliminating suffering but by honestly integrating it into a wider pattern without erasing its cost. Taken together, these resources support a philosophical posture that resists simplification, honors contingency, and remains answerable to the world as it is—precisely the posture reinforced by a Shakespearean sensibility.

The Need for Dante, Too

Of course, there is still profound value in the Dantian approach. Dante Alighieri reminds process philosophy that attentiveness to the particular need not abandon the question of the whole. His translunary imagination safeguards moral seriousness, historical consequence, and hope against the drift toward fragmentation or quietism. Dante insists that lives, however broken or distorted, are not finally episodic—that they belong to a wider horizon of meaning in which justice, memory, and love matter. Without this synoptic vision, process philosophy risks becoming descriptively rich yet cosmologically thin. Dante preserves the conviction that the universe itself is not indifferent to what happens within it, and that the many, though never erased, may yet belong together in ways not fully visible from beneath the moon.

Dante reminds us that we live in a moral universe, one in which ideals are not mere human projections but part of the very furniture of reality itself. Values such as justice, love, fidelity, and hope are woven into the structure of the world, shaping what can be realized and what must be answered for. In this sense, Dante’s translunary vision resonates with process philosophy’s claim that possibilities—what Whitehead calls eternal objects—are real features of the universe, felt as lures that orient becoming toward greater intensity, harmony, and meaning.

Oscillating between Translunary and Sublunary Ways of Thinking

Not only philosophers, but people as such, oscillate between the translunary and the sublunary. We live part of our lives reaching toward larger meanings and final horizons, and part of our lives immersed in immediacy, uncertainty, and consequence. Process philosophy, at its best, is uniquely suited to sustain this oscillation without denying either pole. Its cosmological reach invites translunary vision; its insistence that reality consists of concrete acts of experience anchors it beneath the moon, where choices are made without guarantees and time does not reverse itself. When chastened by Shakespeare—particularly through his tragedies, where the tragic side of life is neither softened nor redeemed in time—process thought remains faithful to the risks of freedom, the weight of misjudgment, and the unfinished character of becoming. When steadied by Dante, it resists despair and affirms that value, meaning, and moral seriousness are not illusions we impose upon the world, but features of reality itself. The task, then, is not to choose between Dante and Shakespeare, but to inhabit the tension between them—to think boldly without evading vulnerability, and to hope without forgetting the ground on which we stand.

True, it is not in the spirit of Whitehead to speak of an Inferno in the way that Dante does. Whitehead’s universe is not governed by retributive finality, nor does it consign persons to eternally fixed states of punishment. Yet this refusal of an eternal Inferno should not be mistaken for moral leniency or metaphysical optimism. On the contrary, Whitehead takes with full seriousness the tragic weight of freedom: the fact that patterns of desire can harden, that subjective aims can become distorted, and that lives can settle into forms of existence that are genuinely destructive to self and others.

In a process universe there may be no everlasting hell, but there are many hells within time—states of alienation, violence, despair, and lovelessness that arise not from divine decree but from the cumulative consequences of misdirected becoming. These conditions are not simply mistakes awaiting correction; they are lived realities that exact real and often irreversible costs. Whitehead’s God does not abolish such hells by fiat. God works within them, persuasively and patiently, offering fresh possibilities without erasing the past that conditions the present. In this way, process philosophy affirms a moral universe without guaranteeing rescue, judgment without final condemnation, and hope that persists not because tragedy is denied, but because it is neither ignored nor given the last word.

Shakespeare and the Play of
Liberal Learning (Clint Brand)

In this conversation we take up Shakespeare’s nearly infinite capacity to educate liberally all who encounter his works in deep and sustained ways.

We also consider how Shakespeare liberally educates us in ways that complement how Dante teaches us. With particular attention to As You Like It, we examine how play—the play of supposition and the play of analogy—can be transferred to the classroom by the best teachers.

Along the way, we consider the contributions to this topic made by Pieper, Huizinga, Gadamer, Sister Miriam Joseph, and Joel Altman.

Links of Potential Interest:

John Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture

Hans Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays

Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language

Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama

Dante and the Liberating Pedagogy
of the Divine Comedy (Clint Brand)

In this conversation with Dr. Clint Brand, we explore what we can learn about liberal learning from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Taking Scott Crider’s recent essay on Dante as our point of departure, we explore how we might read the Commedia as “a series of pedagogical encounters.”

What can we discover about the roles of humility, wonder, love, the soul, dialectic, piety, poetry, and “submission to the real” in the growth of metamorphosis of liberal learning?
What lessons from Dante might we as teachers take into our own classrooms?

Links of potential interest:

Scott Crider’s “Saving Pedagogy: Dante as the Poet of Education” at Public Discourse
Dante’s Commedia (Paradiso)

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

C. S. “Men Without Chests,” in The Abolition of Man

Plato’s Seventh Letter

Newman, Rise and Progress of Universities

Jean Leclercq O.S.B, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God

Clint Brand, ed., St. Gregory’s Prayer Book