Antiquitopia

I am in the middle of teaching Dante's Divine Comedy (the "Divine" purportedly added by Boccaccio), and lines that catch my attention at every reading is in Purgatorio , which, by the way, is my favorite of the three cantica. Of fantasy, you that at times would snatch us so from outward things--we notice nothing although a thousand trumpets sound around us-- who moves you when the senses do not spur you? A light that finds its form in Heaven moves you-- directly or led downward by God's will. Within my fantasy I saw impressed the savagery of one who then, transformed, became the bird that most delights in song; at this, my mind withdrew to the within, to what imagining might bring: no thing that came from the without could enter in. Then into my deep fantasy there rained one who was crucified; and as he died, he showed his savagery and his disdain. (Dante, Purgatorio 17:13-27) In this ode to fantasy, Dante is describing his dreams, but there is something else about...

John Hobbins has a nice posting on "proleptic metaphor" in Job 28. Take a look . He writes, and maybe this will be a good appetizer: Skilled authors are in fact very good at planting semes early on in a stream of discourse such that, at the appropriate time, they will, retroactively, bear metaphorical fruit.* Be sure to read the asterisk at the bottom! *It is fun, in a statement about metaphor, to use an expression like “planting semes.” I’ve run across people whose wooden view of Scripture makes them break into a sweat when they realize that the Bible contains playful etymologies which, from a linguistic point of view, are false. Sooner or later, when reading the Bible or anything else, it is necessary to “let it be,” to quote the Beatles. As Picasso said, “art is a lie which tells the truth.” The Bible is full of truth, but its authors are as faithful to their subjects as Picasso was to his. Since I am a believer, my response is: praise be to God. Or...to bring in Dante, I...

Per me si va ne la citta dolente, per me si va ne l'etterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente. Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore; fecemi la divina podestate, la somma sapienza e 'l primo amore. Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. Through me the way into the suffering city, through me the way to the eternal pain, through me the way that runs among the lost. Justice urged on my high artificer; my maker was divine authority, the highest wisdom, and the primal love. Before me nothing but eternal things were made, and I endure eternally. Abandon every hope, who enter here. (Dante, Inferno 3.1-9; trans. Allen Mandelbaum) Maybe I should post this above my classroom door.... ;)

I just stumbled onto a University of Texas site, Dante's World . It is very cool. You can enter either the Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradiso. Every few cantos have options to view famous artistic renderings of those scenes, such as those by Blake. It also gives key images, explains some lines, gives an audio line or two in Italian, and offers study questions. All in all, a worthwhile site, even for the artistic renderings alone!

Diodorus Siculus relates the story of a broken and scattered god; who of us has never felt, while walking through teh twilight or writing a date from his past, that something infinite had been lost? Men have lost a face, an irrecoverable face, and all long to be that pilgrim (envisioned in the Empyrean, beneath the Rose) who in Rome sees the Veronica and faithfully murmurs: "My Lord, Jesus Christ, true God, and was this, then, the fashion of thy semblance?" Thre is a stone face beside a road with an inscription saying "The True Portrait of the Holy Face of the God of Jaen"; if we really knew what it was like, the key to all parables would be ours and we would know if the carpenter's son was also the Son of God. Paul saw it as a light which hurled him to the ground; John saw it as the sun when it blazes in all its force: Theresa of Leon saw it many times, bathed in a tranquil light, and could never determine the color of its eyes. We have lost these features, j...

So, I have been continuing to read Umberto Eco's On Literature, and he has a nice, very short, essay on Dante Alighieri's Paradiso , called "A Reading of the Paridiso ." He argues that it has been misread and underestimated, in fact devalued, in the nineteenth century and this devaluation continued throughout the twentieth, with the Inferno and, to some extent, the Purgatorio gaining the most attention. In contrast, Eco argues that the Paradiso is the finest of all three canticas. He primarily sets it in the context of the medieval preference for bold, bright color to express themselves in daily life, refined by Dante in the Paradiso . But, what caught my attention is the Paradiso as amazingly modern, and, in fact, futuristic: "Dante's Paradiso is the apotheosis of the virtual world, of nonmaterial things, of pure software, without the weight of earthly or infernal hardware, whose traces remain in the Purgatorio. The Paradiso is more than modern; it can ...