Lis and the "Mad Flight"

8. Never stopping to the appearance

13^th February 2013

San Marcello Pistoiese, Italy

Dante also wants to write a poem inspired by the ancient ones, and takes as his privileged model the Aeneid of Virgil. An epic perspective, therefore, crosses the Comedy.

This time it is, however, a new Christian epic.

In fact, Dante's journey explicitly recalls not only to Aeneas' journey in Hades, but also what Paul did in the third heaven, or even, according to medieval legends, hell itself. Classical and medieval sources are then taken to find a new legitimacy to the theme of the meeting with the deads.
Indeed, this latter is taken as the foundational structure of the design of a new Christian civilization which can recover even the vital instances of the ancient and pagan past and to select both from the history and the present episodes and characters that foresee a future of possible salvation.
With Dante, the encounter with the deads, therefore, stop being a single episode and also becomes the structural basis of the narrative and of an entire religious, ethical and political project.

In this sense, it is essential to speak of polysemy: in fact, the Commedia has different levels of reading and you can focus on the literal, the allegorical, moral or analogical, that is the spiritual, meaning.

A reading in a symbolic key of Dante's text makes extensive use of two rhetorical devices that enable us to understand the hidden messages of the text: the figure and allegory. Although at a first glance, they appear to be similar rhetorical trickeries, a more careful analysis shows profound differences.

In fact, allegory is defined as the translation of an abstract and timeless concept in a concrete image that refers to a code known both to the writer and the reader: for example, in this regard, the famous forest of Inferno, allegory of the sinful conditions of life in which man can lose himself in self-destruction.

In contrast, the figure is in fact built on a character or a historical event. A true story becomes a figure of another one when it can be interpreted as foreshadowing of what is destined to be fulfilled in the future.

Such a kind reading is typical of the medieval Christian world: in this perspective, for example, the freeing of the Jews from slavery in Egypt foreshadows Christ's redemption and absolution from all sin.
We can find a clear example of it in Purgatory II (vv. 46-48) in which the souls, arrived on the beach in front of the mountain of Purgatory, sing unanimously the Psalm 113, In exitu Israel, a clear reference to eternal salvation that awaits man after the painful purgatorial purification.

So, according to the figural conception, the entire earthly life is a figure of eternal destiny.
Dante in his Commedia, however, introduces an important new perspective taking as a privileged point of view, no longer that of the land but of the afterlife.
In this way, all the author discovers, about the afterlife, is but the full realization of the facts and individuals whose earthly life was foreshadowing of what is now lead.

A great scholar of the Comedy figures was the German critic E. Auerbach, who has clearly shown that each occurrence of Dante's entire narrative isn't accidental at all, but designed in every detail to provide valuable information concerning the fate of humanity and not just the private life of Dante or individual historical events .
All other-world meetings symbolize the steps that every-man, in this case played by the pilgrim, must face. Each time you come across historical individuals representing not only the manners and customs of their times, but also the eternal and universal truths, since each of them retains an extraordinary realistic wealth.

In this way it is created a very close and vital bond between concrete and abstract, singular and collective, private and public.

Thanks to figural interpretation we can understand how the world of the deads conceived by Dante is a kind of open book on the values ​​and the true meaning of earthly life, but also the saving plan where the history of all humanity finds its complete fulfilment.

Greta Vacchiano.

Editorial Supervisor: Elisa Lucchesi.