Читать книгу Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie – Studienausgabe. Herausgegeben und ergänzt um Aufsätze, Primärbibliographie und Nachwort von Matthias Bormuth und Martin Vialon онлайн

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None of the explanations of Cant. 1, 4–5 which I know is altogether suitable for our DanteDante passage; but that could not be otherwise. For DanteDante’s sequence of ideas is his peculiar property; no other, before him, would have said that the corruption of the Church in his time had led to a darkening of heaven comparable to that following the Passion of Christ; or that the sviare of human society was due to the lack of imperial power; these ideas were his own, and so he had to use the motifs figlia, pelle, decolorare as they suited his purpose. Thus, he gave a variant or new combination of the traditional interpretations: human society (sponsa Christi, la bella figlia) loses her colour in the sight of the bridegroom (in the sight of Christ, nel primo aspetto),38 or even, if my conjecture concerning the syntactical structure is correct, nel primo aspetto di quel ch’apporta mane e lascia sera – just as in his sight, ne la presenza del Figliuol di Dio (v. 24), the throne of Peter is vacant. It is not very important whether one understands pellis as coelum, or simply as an image of the Church or Christianity used by the sponsa of the Canticles as a comparison with herself. The interpretation resulting from our observations is not new; many scholars have been convinced that the corruption of the Church or of Christianity was meant. It is, however, not our principal purpose to give new interpretations, but to contribute to the understanding of the poetical and symbolical world in which DanteDante lived.