Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-05T17:39:22.211Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 4 - From Speculative Grammar to Visual Spectacle and Beyond

from Part I - The Literary Vision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2021

William Franke
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
Get access

Summary

The profoundly theoretical approach to language on the part of the modistae resulted in the “speculative grammar” that is reflected in Dante’s representation of a deep structure of language. At this level, language is “one in all” (“una in tutti”), yet this underlying condition of unity is not as such articulable. Dante envisages ultimately a unity beyond language altogether. Dante cannot represent God as such, but he can imitate God’s art by a total artifice that absorbs matter into its own creation of form. This hyper-artificiality of Dante’s writing makes images revelations not of anything that is as such but of an unlimited indeterminate power of creation that performs in the image of God. It works on a necessarily negative logic. God is “seen” negatively, or is understood (by Dante in heaven) through the invisible divinity’s being manifest analogically in an infinite process of mediation that then dissolves and so points back to its invisible source. This is allowed to occur by Dante’s making the linguistic, and specifically written, medium itself his object of contemplation – in effect, the visio Dei. God can be given to experience only through mediations, specifically through their infinity, and Dante’s vision of divinity in the mediations of language says as much. In some sense, Dante suggests, his vision of the medium (writing) gives rise to an immediate vision of the divine. This paradox is explored and illuminated through the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and through art theory and the anthropology of images. Contemporary art historians and theorists have meditated deeply on the role of images in making absence present. Through emphasizing the writtenness of his vision of God in Paradise, Dante is already bringing out into the open what particularly Didi-Huberman and Jean-Claude Schmitt, as well as Hans Belting, emphasize about images as making absence present. They glimpse the unlimitedness of this absence, moreover, sometimes even in its theological implications and connotations. This realization of absence can become a kind of enactment of divinity, an incarnation in mental experience, and even in an aesthetic medium, of God. Metaphysical reality is thus made to appear through the image. A theologization of the presencing of absence through the image can surely be discerned in Dante’s “scenography” in the Heaven of Jove.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Divine Vision of Dante's Paradiso
The Metaphysics of Representation
, pp. 108 - 137
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×