‘Imaginary sight’ and ‘sightless view’

All seeing takes place in the brain. But not all seeing is directly caused from without by the action of reflected light, as we should now say; or, as Dante would have said, not all seeing is caused by the action of opaque bodies, colouring the illuminated atmosphere and thus transmitting ‘intentional impressions’ of themselves through the pupil of the eye, up the optic nerve and into the common sense. And whichever standpoint one adopts, the Comedy is in large measure the result of a second kind of seeing in which the brain becomes aware of images arising from within itself.

Modern readers would probably agree that the poem is a product of the creative imagination, recording what Shakespeare called a ‘journey in the head’. Earlier readers accepted not only the Renaissance amendment to the title (The ‘Divine’ Comedy), but a tendentious sub-title: ‘The Vision of Dante Alighieri’. Many of them felt it was the record of a datable vision of the Trinity, divinely inspired and, to some extent, prophetic of future events. And Dante himself, who took such extraordinary pains to suggest that he really did move as a corpus mobile through the afterworld and apprehend things with his external organs of sense, reminds us nevertheless at frequent intervals that what he is putting into verse, in a preordained number of pages, are simply those images which have been preserved in his memory.