The Divine Vision of Dante's Paradiso
The Metaphysics of Representation

A bold study that reveals Dante's medieval vision of Scripture as theophany through pioneering use of contemporary theory and phenomenology.

William Franke (Author)

9781316517024, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 August 2021

300 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.623 kg

'Franke seeks to interpret Dante's vision of writing in ways that make it available to philosophical analysis and speculative contemplation, methods aesthetic and spiritual at the same time. Such connections offer important resources for philosophical and theological reflections that resonate 'in the excruciating dilemmas of [the] present cultural predicament' ... Highly recommended.' D. Pesta, Choice Connect

In Canto XVIII of Paradiso, Dante sees thirty-five letters of Scripture - LOVE JUSTICE, YOU WHO RULE THE EARTH - 'painted' one after the other in the sky. It is an epiphany that encapsulates the Paradiso, staging its ultimate goal - the divine vision. This book offers a fresh, intensive reading of this extraordinary passage at the heart of the third canticle of the Divine Comedy. While adapting in novel ways the methods of the traditional lectura Dantis, William Franke meditates independently on the philosophical, theological, political, ethical, and aesthetic ideas that Dante's text so provocatively projects into a multiplicity of disciplinary contexts. This book demands that we question not only what Dante may have meant by his representations, but also what they mean for us today in the broad horizon of our intellectual traditions and cultural heritage.

Part I. The Literary Vision
1. Writing as Theophany: The Medium as Metaphor for Immediacy
2. The Presence of Speech in Writing: Speaking as Sparking
3. The Parts of Speech: Mediation and Contingency
4. From Speculative Grammar to Visual Spectacle and Beyond
5. Sense Made Sensuous and Synaesthesia in the Sight and Sound of Writing
6. Infinite Script: Endless Mediation as Metaphor for Divinity
Part II. Philosophical Reflections
I. Language as Concocted of Letters versus the Mysticism of the Name
II. Saussure and the Structuralist Idea of Language as a System of Differences
III. Temporalization and Transcendence of Time through Language
IV. Transcendental Reflection: Time Synthesis and the Role of the 'I'
V. Unmanifest Wholeness of Sense: Language as Image of the Imageless
VI. Transcendentality of Language and the Language of the Other.

Subject Areas: Theology [HRLB], Western philosophy: Medieval & Renaissance, c 500 to c 1600 [HPCB], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]