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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Veramente quant’ io del regno santo

ne la mia mente potei far tesoro,

sarà ora matera del mio canto.

At this point, as always, he remains the man who has returned from the other world and records what he has seen, so that others may read it.

DanteDante was the writer of a book, and the vas d’elezione of a revelation which he had to report in that book. Hence, the book had to combine didactics and poetic fascination; a forceful charming of the soul which particularly suited his revelation, since this was shaped as a sequence of events, as a journey through the other world, highly emotional in all its parts, and linked at every moment to the most urgent problems of contemporary life. The Commedia is a special development of the tradition of the Gospels, which also were a revelation of a doctrine centered around an historical event. As the announcer of a revelation, the poet surpasses his readers: he knows something of the highest importance which they have to learn from him. In spite of the charity that he exercises towards his fellowmen, by imparting his knowledge, and of the fact that, as a human being, he is their equal before God, Divine Grace, by electing him for this special revelation, has rised him above all other mortals. The reader is not his equal. He may well repudiate DanteDante’s message, accuse him as a liar, a false prophet, an emissary of Hell, yet he cannot argue with him on a level of equality, he must ‘take it or leave it’. These last sentences, of course, are exaggerated; the contemporary reader already knew that all this: mission, journey, and actual revelation in Purgatory and Heaven, was poetical fiction. But a fiction so fused with reality that one easily forgets where its realm begins; and DanteDante’s narrative is so dense, so invariably consistent in its linking of true events that some of its realistic suggestion survives, at least temporarily, in many minds. At any rate, his relation to the reader, as expressed in the addresses, is inspired by this ‘poetic fiction’: DanteDante addresses the reader as if everything that he has to report were not only factual truth, but truth containing Divine Revelation. The reader, as envisioned by DanteDante (and in point of fact, DanteDante creates his reader), is a disciple. He is not expected to discuss or to judge, but to follow; using his own forces, but the way DanteDante orders him to do.