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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di più savere angosciosa carizia;

e per te vederai …

Obviously, the originality of DanteDante’s addresses to the reader is a symptom of a new relationship between both, one which is based on DanteDante’s conception of his own rôle and function as a poet. With the utmost explicitness and consistency, he maintains the attitude of a man who, by special grace, after Aeneas and Paul, has been admitted to see the other world, and has been entrusted with a mission as important as theirs: to reveal to mankind God’s eternal order and, accordingly, to teach his fellow men what is wrong in the structure of human life at this special moment of history. The imperial power, ordained to unite and to govern human society, is despised and almost destroyed; the papacyPapsttum has forgotten its spiritual function, by transgressing its boundaries, by pursuing worldly ambitions and worldly avarice, it has ruined itself and has corrupted the entire human family. DanteDante goes so far as to describe this disorder as a second fall of man. True, such ideas were not unheard of: similar motifs had occurred at least since the time of the Investiture conflictInvestiturstreit.20 Yet a great poem in the vernacular with such a content and such an attitude of the writer was entirely new. It implied, indeed, it necessitated a kind of relation to the reader similar to a prophet’s to his hearers: authoritative, urgent, and, at the same time, inspired by Christian charity; trying, at every moment, to keep his hold upon the reader, and to let him share, as concretely and intensely as possible, in the whole experience reported in the poem. The form of the addresses, indeed, is often similar to that of classical apostrophesApostrophe; but whenever DanteDante adapted such a classical form in addressing his reader, he would Christianize it.