Dante's Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought

Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection

William Franke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000361803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Self-reflection, as the hallmark of the modern age, originates more profoundly with Dante than with Descartes. This book rewrites modern intellectual history, taking Dante's lyrical language in Paradiso as enacting a Trinitarian self-reflexivity that gives a theological spin to the birth of the modern subject already with the Troubadours. The ever more intense self-reflexivity that has led to our contemporary secular world and its technological apocalypse can lead alsoto the poetic vision of other worlds such as those experienced by Dante. Facing the same nominalist crisis as Duns Scotus, his exact contemporary and the precursor of scientific method, Dante's thought and work indicate an alternative modernity along the path not taken. Thisother wayshows up in Nicholas of Cusa's conjectural science and in Giambattista Vico's new science of imagination as alternatives tothe exclusive reign of positiveempirical science. In continuity with Dante's vision, they contribute to a reappropriation of self-reflection for the humanities.

PART I

The Paradiso’s Theology of Language and its Lyric Origins

Out of the Abyss

4The Self-Reflexive Trinitarian Structure of God and Creation

At the beginning of the tenth canto of the Paradiso, Dante invokes the interior life of the Godhead as consisting in relations among the persons of the Holy Trinity. This life is manifest analogically in the works of the Creation in both the physical and the spiritual cosmos:

Guardando nel suo Figlio con l’Amore

che l’uno e l’altro etternalmente spira,

lo primo e ineffabile Valore

quanto per mente e per loco si gira

con tant’ordine fé, ch’esser non puote

sanza gustar di lui chi ciò rimira.

(X.1–6)

(Looking on his Son with Love,

which the one and the other eternally exhales,

the first and ineffable Worth

made all that revolves in the mind and in space

with such order that whoever gazes on all this

cannot fail to taste of Him.)

God contemplates his own image in his only begotten Son with Love. This Love emerges as a person in its own right and is identified with his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the third person or “hypostasis” of the Trinity that is breathed forth (“spira”) eternally from the other two—in conformity with the filioque doctrine of the Roman Church. Reflecting thus lovingly on his own perfect image, God created or made (“fé”) the visible universe of stars and planets in space, as well as the invisible, purely intellectual or “mental” universe of the angels, who turn the spheres of the heavens (“quanto per mente e per loco si gira”).

God creates specularly, by means of this reflection on himself. The intimate life of love within the Godhead is thereby reflected and projected outward into the Creation. All beings throughout the universe are made in the image of this self-reflexive, self-engendering divine Being. The fundamental difference, of course, is that the images are only created being rather than the increate Being of the Creator. This means that the self-reflexive being of creatures is not an absolute, self-standing existence, but only a reflection. Only the unique Being of the Creator fully and absolutely is. Only the Creator is unqualified and unconditioned Being. All other beings depend for their very being on this unique Being, whom all resemble or imitate in infinitely variable form and measure.

The self-reflexive structure of the divine life thus provides the model for the order of the entire created universe. All is made in the image of the Son’s being the perfect image of the Father and the Holy Spirit the hypostasis of their self-reflexive relation, their Love (“Amore”). Consequently, it is impossible, according to Dante, for whoever turns a contemplating gaze toward the heavens, not to at least glimpse (literally “taste”) the reflected image of God in the order of the Creation. All beings—especially the highest—cannot help but reflect the Supreme Being from whom they have their being and are created.

Once this panoramic gaze at the opening of Paradiso X has moved from the Creator to the intellectual creation (the angelic orders) and arrives at the physical (stellar and planetary) universe, it focuses in particular on the earth’s temporal ordering by the sun’s revolutions. This cosmic order within the orbit of the sun and its temporal scansion are seen to reflect the eternal Being of God. Time, as it appears visibly in the motions and processes of the universe, is an image of the eternal Life of the Trinity—of the “processions” of the Son from the Father and of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. The whole created order is a self-reflection of the Godhead, which constitutes itself likewise intrinsically by means of self-reflection.

Self-reflexivity belongs to the internal structure of the Godhead (insofar as God can be revealed to us at all) and defines also the innermost structure of the Creation. Indeed, the Creation is nothing but a self-reflection of God gotten up out of nothing—ex nihilo. Scripture instructs us that God can be seen reflected analogically in all Creation: “the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” (Romans 1:20). Saint Francis’s “Canticle of the Sun” (Laudes Creaturarum), at one exaltedly sacred source of vernacular tradition, already lends surpassingly lyrical expression to all Creation as the image and praise of its Creator.

Of course, in our life on earth, God is seen only “through a glass darkly” (“videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate,” I Corinthians 13:12). Nevertheless, God’s glory, apart from being made crystal clear in the Son, “being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3), is manifest also in the perfection of Creation as reflected in the heavens, which act as the unblemished self-reflection of increate in created being. Dante’s whole poem is moving toward a speculative climax or apotheosis in which Paradise, as the assembly of the blessed in the celestial Rose, is going to be seen as the consummate created reflection of God. Such a mirroring reflection crystallizes as the crowning metaphor for God’s unrepresentable glory and splendor.

The Self-Reflective Structure of Language Made Manifest

This theme of God as absolute Self-Reflection reflected into the created order from the lowest up to the highest echelons of the universe stretches as an overarching theme of Dante’s poem from beginning to end. Yet even before or below this explicit, thematic level, the divine self-reflection is at work in Dante’s poem itself simply as a poem and in the very language it employs. We can gain a different, and in some ways a more penetrating, view into self-reflection by considering how it operates in Dante’s language itself. At this level, the poem embodies the dynamics of self-reflexivity not just in what it says and represents, but also in what it actually is and does in and through its working as language. The ineffable burden of the poem is delivered in the form of its own self-reflexive poetic process in a more immediate and intimate way than by any thematic declarations or expositions. Even more directly than the self-reflexivity of the created universe, the self-reflexive creativity of language as such reflects and embodies the supreme Self-Reflection in the Word, the Logos, who is the divine Creator himself (John 1:3). Paradise is accessible to Dante (at least as the poet of the Paradiso) essentially in and through language, especially lyric language, with its heightened intensity of self-reflectiveness. God, as he is experienced in and through Dante’s Paradiso, is reflected primarily in language and only secondarily in the cosmos that this language refers to and represents.

Thus, in a sense that would have been evident to Dante and his contemporaries, the self-reflexive structure of the Trinity is embodied in the immanent order of language even more immediately than in the outward order of Creation, whether of the physical or of the spiritual universe.¹ The essential ground of the universe and of language alike is the divine Word “by whom all things were made” (πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, John 1:3). Human language depends on and reflects this divine Word, which is the Son, “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), the perfect reflected image of the Father. Human language, too, accordingly, cannot but be self-reflexive in its essential nature, even though it is imperfect, having been corrupted by sin (De vulgari eloquentia I.vii). This reflexivity of language is key to its becoming in Dante’s poem a vehicle of transcendence leading to God. In essence, the poem aims to become God the Word’s own self-reflection. To be a perfect reflection of God, language itself must become perfectly self-reflective. Such a goal for poetic language is approached asymptotically in the Paradiso.

1Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press: 1986), 310, demonstrates the bases of this medieval mentality giving priority to language as the immediate embodiment of divinity. The Incarnation of the Word is directly reflected as incarnation in words. Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) traces the impact of this divine Logos theology through the medieval sign theories of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas to Dante.

The discovery and display particularly in lyrical poetry—or more exactly in poetic lyricism—of language’s inherent self-reflexive powers, with its capacities to be and to give being, intelligibility, pathos, sweetness, beauty, and sublimity, manifests a submerged theology of poetic language with roots in the Christian theology of the Word by whom all things were made. Poetry thus becomes an exploration in service of and in devotion to the divine Word.² Even apart from using human words for the purpose of communicating human meanings, poetic language can be a revelation of the divine truth and meaning of the being and destiny of human life and history. Poetry is thereby destined to reassume a prophetic vocation such as it already had in the Bible—conspicuously in the sublime rhetoric of certain passages of the prophetic books and of Job that are chock-full of lyrical fantasy and emotional transport. Dante’s lyric poetics of self-reflection implicitly realizes such a prophetic revelation.

2Michael Martin, The Incarnation of the Poetic Word: Theological Essays on Poetry & Philosophy (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2017) explores modern continuations in this key.

Even if language per se is not explicitly thematized in this particular passage at the opening of Paradiso X, it is nevertheless the vehicle here, as elsewhere, of every theme throughout the poem, and this condition is made explicit in other passages. Most conspicuously, language is spectacularly displayed in the Heaven of Jove in Canto XVIII.70–126, with its theophany of letters: DILIGITE IUSTITIAM QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM. Its role as medium and as mediation is brought to the center of attention and becomes itself the immediate object of contemplation.³ This dramatic reversal of roles between vehicle and tenor, between language as the medium of the divine vision and as itself an object of contemplation, is the fundamental gesture of the Paradiso as an apotheosis of language. Especially through its lyricism, the poem is able to project language in an extraordinary way rendering it in an eminent sense a protagonist of the poem.

3My “Schrift als Theophanie in Dantes Paradiso: Das Medium als Metapher für die göttliche Unmittelbarkeit,” Schrift und Graphisches im Vergleich, ed. Monika Schmitz-Emans, Linda Simonis, and Simone Sauer-Kretschmer (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2019), 59–70, elucidates this reading.

The Abyss of Godhead and the Self-Reflexive Being of Language

However, there is also something else implicit in this passage presenting the divine Trinity that is crucial for a deeper apprehension and appreciation of the self-reflexive dynamic of language in Dante’s Paradiso. The internal self-reflexivity of God consists not just in the reflective mirroring and communication of positive traits or perfections of his Being such as unity or goodness or beauty or simplicity. Self-reflexivity entails not just a duplication of and return to the Same but also a relating to an Other wit...