RT Article
T1 Light Metaphysics, Dante's ‘Convivio’ and the Letter to Can Grande Della Scala
JF Traditio
VO 14
SP 191
OP 229
A1 Mazzeo, Joseph Anthony
LA English
PB Cambridge University Press
YR 1958
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/179803347X
AB From the beginning of the Divine Comedy — ‘where the sun is silent’ — to the final vision of light, the poem is a carefully ordered hierarchy of light and shadows. We are not only asked to see clearly but we are asked to see qualitatively, to distinguish degrees of light and kinds of vision. It is in the last canto of the Paradiso that the degree of light is most intense and that our attention is called to a unique kind of seeing. With extraordinary insistence, Dante repeats some form of the verb vedere (to see) or a derivative there-of every few lines. The transition from time to eternity and from the finite to the infinite makes all the more sophisticated resources of language inadequate, and one must revert to a childlike form of emphasis, mere repetitions. This simplest of rhetorical devices is, by some miracle of art, adequate for the expression of the most unimaginable of possible experiences. In every line we feel something of Dante's joy in the possession of a ‘novella vista’ and his rapture in the divine vision, an effect conveyed by the very struggle to express the inexpressible. The struggles of course are those of Dante the pilgrim; Dante the poet is in perfect control of his artistic resources, and it is through the masterly rendering of inadequacy that the whole presentation becomes — paradoxically — adequate.
DO 10.1017/S0362152900010096