Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection 2020044778, 9780367714666, 9781003152156, 9780367740344

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Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought

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 also to 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. This other way shows up in Nicholas of Cusa’s conjectural science and in Giambattista Vico’s new science of imagination as alternatives to the exclusive reign of positive empirical science. In continuity with Dante’s vision, they contribute to a reappropriation of self-​reflection for the humanities. William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities, a Dante scholar, and professor of comparative literature and religion at Vanderbilt University. He has also been professor and chair of philosophy at the University of Macao (2013–​ 16); Fulbright-​ University of Salzburg Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religion (2006–07); and Alexander von Humboldt-​Stiftung research fellow at the University of Potsdam (1994–95). In addition to two monographs on Dante—​ Dante’s Interpretive Journey (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Dante and the Sense of Transgression: “The Trespass of the Sign” (Bloomsbury, 2013)—​Franke’s critical theory books include Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (Stanford University Press, 2009)  and A Theology of Literature: The Bible as Revelation in the Tradition of the Humanities (Cascade, 2017). These works follow up on books tracing prophetic poetry from its sources to Dante (The Revelation of Imagination: From Homer and the Bible through Virgil and Augustine to Dante, Northwestern University Press, 2015)  and then forward from Dante through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Leopardi,

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to more recent modern classics including Baudelaire, Dickinson, and Yeats (Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante, Ohio State University Press, 2016). Two forthcoming books from Cambridge University Press deal with the Vita nuova and the Paradiso as poetics of revelation and theophany respectively. Franke’s more strictly philosophical works include A Philosophy of the Unsayable (Notre Dame University Press, 2014) and his reconstruction of what he presents as the tradition of apophatic discourse in On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (Notre Dame University Press, 2007, 2  vols.). His Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders (SUNY Press, 2018, series on Chinese Philosophy and Culture) extends this project into an intercultural philosophy, taking it to sources in Asian thought. Most recently, The Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (Notre Dame University Press, 2020), applies this philosophy to address otherwise intractable critical dilemmas in media studies, identity politics of race and gender, and cognitive sciences in their struggle with the humanities. Franke teaches, lectures, and carries on public dialogue with students and researchers in multiple disciplines and languages (Italian, French, German, Spanish, English) across four continents.

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To myself, Étranger à moi-​même

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Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

127 Spatial Literary Studies Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination Edited by Robert T. Tally Jr. 128 Prison Writing and the Literary World Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice Edited by Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall 129 Shakespeare and Accentism Edited by Adele Lee 130 Musical Stimulacra Literary Narrative and the Urge to Listen Ivan Delazari 131 Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-​Reflection William Franke 132 Ethnicity and Kinship in North American and European Literatures Edited by Silvia Schultermandl and Klaus Rieser 133 Pluralism, Poetry, and Literacy A Test of Reading and Interpretive Techniques Xavier Kalck 134 Visual Representations of the Arctic Imagining Shimmering Worlds in Culture, Literature and Politics Edited by Markku Lehtimäki, Arja Rosenholm and Vlad Strukov For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​Routledge-​Interdisciplinary-​Perspectives-​on-​ Literature/book-​series/​RIPL

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Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-​Reflection William Franke

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First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 William Franke The right of William Franke to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Franke, William, author. Title: Dante’s Paradiso and the theological origins of modern thought : toward a speculative philosophy of self-reflection/William Franke. Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020044778 | ISBN 9780367714666 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003152156 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Paradiso. | Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321–Versification. | Self in literature. | Theology in literature. | Christian poetry–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PQ4462 .F73 2021 | DDC 851/.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/20200447 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​71466-​6  (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-74034-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​15215-​6  (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

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Contents

Prologue  Acknowledgments 

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Introduction: The Theological Apotheosis of Lyric in Dante’s Paradiso 

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1 Self-​Reflexion and Lyricism in the Paradiso 

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Lyric Poetics of Presence through Self-​Reflection in the Paradiso  5 Narcissus and the Reality of Reflection  8 Metaphorical Poetics of Invisible Presence  11 From Formalist Poetics to the Paradise of Poetic Language  16

2 Orientation to Philosophical Logics and Rhetorics of Self-​Reflexivity 

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3 Self-​Reflexive Lyricism and Ineffability 

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Self-​Reflexivity as an Eminent Way of Theological Transcendence  27 Language of the Other as Reflection of Trinitarian and Incarnational Theology  29

PART I

The Paradiso’s Theology of Language and its Lyric Origins: Out of the Abyss 

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4 The Self-​Reflexive Trinitarian Structure of God and Creation 

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The Self-​Reflective Structure of Language Made Manifest  37 The Abyss of Godhead and the Self-​Reflexive Being of Language  39

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5 Beyond Representation—​Origins of Lyric Reflection in Nothing 

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6 The Circularity of Song—​and its Mystic Upshot 

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7 Self-​Reflexive Fulfillment in Lyric Tradition and its Theological Troping by Dante 

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8 The Lark Motif and its Echoes 

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9 An Otherness Beyond Objective Representation and Reference 

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10 The Mother Bird’s Vigil—​Canto XXIII and the Lyric Circle 

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11 Ineffability in the Round—​and its Breakthrough 

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12 The Substance of Creation as Divine Self-​Reflection 

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13 Eclipse of Trinity and Incarnation as Models of Transcendence through Self-​Reflection 

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14 Narcissus and his Redemption by Dante 

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Troubadour Origins of Lyric Self-​Transcendence in Nothing  43 Social Dimension and Sitz-​im-​Leben of Troubadour Lyric  46 Primary Narcissism or the Death Duel of Self with Nothing  49

Ontological Resonances of Self-​Reflection  63

Lyrical Self-​Reflexiveness as Foretaste of Paradise  74 Lyric Self-​Reflection and the Creation of Time    77

Circles of (Self-​)Reflection from the Core of Creation to the Trinitarian Godhead  83 The Broken-​Open Circle or Chiasmus  84

Self-​Reflexivity as Trinitarian and Incarnational  90

Divine Narcissus  101

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Contents  ix PART II

Self-​Reflection on the Threshold between the Middle Ages and Modernity: A Theological Genealogy of the Birthing of Modernity as the Age of Representation 

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15 Self-​Reflective Refoundation of Consciousness in Philosophy 

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16 From Postmodern to Premodern Critique of Self-​Reflection—​Egolology versus Theology 

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17 Self-​Reflection in the Turning from Medieval to Modern Epistemology 

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18 Crisis of Conflicting Worldviews and Duns Scotus 

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19 Toward the Self-​Reflexive Formation of Transcendental Concepts 

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20 Severance of Theory from Practice, Disentangling of Infinite from Finite, by Transcendental Reflection 

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21 Scotus’s Discovery of a New Path for Metaphysics—​ Intensities of Being 

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22 Scotus’s Formal Distinction 

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23 The Intensional Object of Onto-​theology as Transcendental Science 

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24 Phenomenological Reduction and the Univocity of Being 

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25 The Epistemological Turn in the Formal Understanding of Being 

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26 Signification of the Real and an Autonomous Sphere for Representation 

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27 Objective Representation—​Beyond Naming and Desiring the Divine 

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Duns’s Original Concept—​Univocal Being  122

The Good as Sought through Will without Intellect—​Subjectivity  149

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28 Conceptual Production of “Objective” Being—​The Way of Representation 

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29 From Logical (Dis)Analogy to Imaginative Conjecture versus the Forgetting of Being 

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30 Reflective Repetition Realized in the Supersensible Reality of Willing 

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31 Fichte’s Absolutization—​and Overcoming—​of Self-​Reflection 

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32 From Analogy to Metaphor 

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The Paradigm of Representation and Dante’s Alternative Version  152

Fichte’s Reversal of Reflection into Revelation  164 From Religious to Poetic Revelation—Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hamann  166

Henry of Ghent and Analogical Imagination  169 Secular and Theological in Dante and Duns  170

33 Univocity as Ground of the Autonomy of the Secular  175 34 The Fate of Negative Theology in Scotus 

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35 Coda on Scotus and Modality 

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Possible Worlds and Possibility as Greater than Actuality  181

36 Arabic Epistemology of Reflection of Transcendence  183 PART III

The Origin of Language in Reflection and the Breaking of its Circuits: Overcoming the Age of Representation through Repetition  187 37 The Tradition of Self-​Reflection and Modern Self-​ Forgetting 

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38 The Original Event of Language in Modern Lyric Tradition 

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Self-​Negating and Self-​Transcending Self-​Reflection  191

The Individual and the Other—A Mirror Relation  197

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39 The New Rhetoric of Reflexivity in Geoffrey de Vinsauf  200 40 Poetic Self-​Referentiality as Creative Source—​From Paradiso to les Symbolistes 

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41 The Paradox of Lyric as Song of the Self—​Deflected to the Other 

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42 Self and Other between Order and Chance—​ Ambiguity in Lyric Language 

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43 Language beyond Representation—​Repetition and Performativity 

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44 Quest for the Origin of Language—​From De vulgari eloquentia to the Paradiso 

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45 Dante’s Recovery of Speculative Metaphysics as Productive 

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46 Referentially Empty Signs and Semiotic Plenitude 

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47 Sum—​Lyric as Self-​Manifestation of Language and its Ontological Power of Creation 

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From Reference to Repetition—​The Production of Presence  213 From Modern Philosophies of Repetition to Lyric as Non-​Identical Repetition  214

PART IV

Self-​Reflection, Speculation, and Revelation: Modern Philosophy and the Linguistic Way to Wisdom in Western Tradition 

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48 Lacanian Psychoanalytics of Self-​love: From the In-​fantile to the Divine 

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49 Formal Linguistic Approaches to Self-​Reflexivity 

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Vindicating the Aesthetic Autonomy of the Linguistic Sign  234 Social and Theological Perspectives—Language as Fallen and as Resurrected  237

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50 Formalist Theory of the Poem and Agamben’s “La fine del poema” 

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51 Self-​Reflexivity and Self-​Transcendence—​Toward the Unknown 

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52 The Ambiguity of Self-​Reflection in Contemporary Thought and History 

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53 The Historical Turn of Self-​Reflection in Vico’s New Science 

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54 Self-​Reflexivity in Paradiso and the Secular Destiny of the West 

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55 Language as Speculative Mirroring of the Whole of Being in the Word—​Gadamer 

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The Ambiguity of Self-​Reflection as Means to Self-​Transcendence or as End-​in-​Itself  247 Critical Wisdom versus Technological Framing  250 Self-​Reflection in the Tension between Science and Mysticism  251

Dialectic and Coincidence of Secular and Sacred  255 Reflecting to the Origins of Thinking  257 Self-​Reflective Imagining of the Unknowable: From Vico to Dante  258 The Unknown and One’s Own Limits  259 Cyclical Repetition of Birth to Humanity and Barbarism  262

Gay Science as Immediacy of Self-​Reflective Knowing  269

56 From Philosophical Idealism to Linguistic Ontology  276 57 Language as Revelation or Revealment 

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58 Language as Disclosure in Lyric Time—​Heidegger, Heraclitus, and Unconcealment 

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Revelation and Re-​Veiling—From Purgatorio XXIX–​XXXIII to Paradiso  282

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Contents  xiii PART V

Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus and the Spiritual Vocation of Poetry as an Exercise in Self-​Reflection 

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59 Lyric Subjectivity and Narcissism—​Totalization and Transcendence 

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60 Narcissus Redeemed—Positive Precedents from Plotinus 

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Lyric Poetics and Psychoanalytical Subjectification  292 From Lyric Idealization to Epic Spiritual Journey of Self-​Perfection  294

61 Lyric Self-​Reflection and the Subversion of the Proper  301 62 Lyric Language as Spiritual Knowledge in its Sensual Immediacy—​Orphic Echoes 

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63 The Exaltation of Technique in the Troubadours and in Dante’s Stony Rhymes 

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64 Lyric Reflexivity in Panoptic Historical-​Philosophical Perspective—​Troubadours, Christianity, and Romanticism 

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65 Romantic Singularity as a New Universal Reflexivity  316 66 Dante’s Narcissus Redeemed—​A Perennial Paradigm for Contemporary Thought  Epilogue: Reflexive Stylistics in the Language of Paradiso 

321 324

Postscript on Method: From Genealogy to Apophatics  333 Index  335

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But as the sharpest eye discerneth nought,     Except the sunne-​beames in the ayre doe shine;     So the best Soule with her reflecting thought     Sees not her selfe without some light diuine.             Sir John Davies, “Of the Soule of Man, and the Immortalite Thereof,” Nosce Teipsum (1599)

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Figure 0.1 Caravaggio’s Narcissus Michelangelo da Caravaggio, “Narcissus” (1598–​99) Courtesy of Gallerie Nazionali d’Arte Antica (MIBACT)—Biblioteca Hertziana, Istituto Max Planck per la storia dell’arte/Enrico Fontolan.

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Prologue

Philosophers traditionally attribute the foundation of modern thought to René Descartes, who in his Discours de la méthode (1637) extensively deploys metaphors of “founding” for his theory of how to reground the edifice of knowledge on the clear and distinct certainty of the cogito: “I think, therefore I  am.” Cultural historians sometimes locate a remoter starting point for modernity in Luther and the Protestant Reformation—​ datable from the 1517 hypothetical nailing of the 95 theses onto the door of the castle church at Wittenberg. Here, too, modernity is about establishing the individual self and its own free power of reflection. In this case, however, the mirror of conscience serves as the basis for a life lived in relation to the absolutes of divine grace and Scriptural revelation. Although less a commonplace in intellectual history, Dante (1265–​ 1321) already reveals an antecedent discovery of what was to emerge as modern self-​reflexivity. In the Convivio, notably Books III and IV.ii.18, Dante theorizes philosophy as essentially a form of self-​ reflection. Momentously, the protagonist of the Divine Comedy then enacts this self-​consciousness in every dimension of his human and historical existence. The first-​person, autobiographical narrative of the whole poem—​ but most particularly the lyrical art of the Paradiso—​turns language into an intensively self-​reflective medium. In his practice of the art of poetry, Dante models a different kind of origin for a different conception of modernity than the one that has reigned supreme in our overwhelmingly science-​and-​technology-​dominated culture. Of course, yet earlier contenders, some belonging to the context of the so-​called twelfth-​century Renaissance emanating from the School of Chartres, along with Saint Augustine’s autobiographical reflections, vie for the distinction of being first to cross this threshold of self-​reflexivity leading to modern consciousness. We can even trace the emergence of self-​reflection in a still broader sense back much further to “the Axial Age” (in Karl Jasper’s coinage), pivoting around 500 BC E , as an ancient, pre-​Christian founding of “modern” humanity by critical, self-​reflexive thought in civilizations ranging from Greece to Israel, India, Persia, and China.

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Prologue  xvii In the midst of this pluri-​millennial trajectory, Dante serves as a focal point for contemplating the stakes of self-​reflection as a revolutionary, epoch-​making turn of consciousness. He is universally acknowledged for his preeminence as a medieval poet, but in what follows Dante is made to stand up in his full stature and living presence as a philosophical, theological, and literary thinker. The apotheosis of self-​consciousness in Dante links him with a new secular outlook and attitude—​our inescapable heritage today—​yet also with a theological vision. It is a vision that recognizably lies in our past, although it could also belong, in unsuspected ways, to our future. This extended historical perspective provides numerous strategic angles of perception foregrounding some of the remarkable operations of self-​reflexive thought and language in Dante’s writing. Viewed through these optics, Dante’s texts raise many of the intricate issues concerning self-​reflexivity that we struggle with still at present. Self-​reflexivity emerges in Dante as a liberating resource for remaking our world in the ideal human image, but it also rears its head in an uglier shape as a disaster entailing a humanistic, narcissistic reduction, cutting us off from genuine relation with others and even with the Other as a theological or existential Absolute. Curtailing our openness to alterity, self-​reflection can condemn a whole civilization to nihilism, sterility, and death. This book proposes to journey with Dante between Scylla and Charybdis in the quest to seize the salvific potential of self-​reflection, while learning to evade its deathly perversions.

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Acknowledgments

Fertile seedbeds for these reflections were seminars that I had the opportunity to offer in Frankfurt, Jerusalem, and Urbino: * Block-​Seminar: “Apophatische Theologie und ihre Wirkung auf die neuzeitliche Philosophie” [Apophatic Theology and its Consequences in Modern Philosophy], Goethe University of Frankfurt, Philosophy Department, Summer Semester, 2016 * Lecture-​ Workshop: “Dante’s Theology and Contemporary Thought,” International Seminar on “Dante’s Theology” sponsored by Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Leeds Center for Dante Studies, Devers Program for Dante Studies, University of Notre Dame, at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem, June 16–​22, 2013 * Summer Seminar: “Dante e la teologia negativa” [Dante and Negative Theology], ISSR (Istituto Superiore di Scienze Religiose), Carlo Bo University of Urbino, August 15–​19, 2011 For these motivating opportunities, I  thank Wilhelm Essler; Christian Moevs, Vittorio Montemaggi, Anne Leone, and Matthew Treherne; Andrea Aguti and Pier-​Giorgio Grassi. This research project also grows out of lectures that I was privileged to give at the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies in Chicago; at a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Institute in Florence; and at a Religion and Literature Forum at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana: * “The Apotheosis of Self-​Reflection: Dante and the Inauguration of the Modern Era,” Annual Dante Lecture at the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies, Chicago, February 27, 2016

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Acknowledgments  xix * “Self-​Reflection and the Theological Apotheosis of Lyric in the Paradiso,” Lecture at NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Summer Institute: “Dante’s Divine Comedy, poetry, philosophy, and the city of Florence,” Florence, July 21, 2014 * “Scripture as Theophany in Dante’s Paradiso,” 2006 Annual Lecture in Religion and Literature, University of Notre Dame, October 30, 2006 For invitations to give these lectures, I thank Karen Chistianson and Ted Cachy; Brenda Schildgen and Peter Hawkins; Thomas Werge, James Dougherty, and Kevin Hart. I thank all participants and publics for much fruitful exchange. Thanks to Aaron Daniels and Christian Dupont for the invitation to present a plenary address at the “Dante Salon” within the frame of the “Psychology and the Other 2019 Conference” (reprising a 2018 MLA [Modern Language Association] national convention presentation): *“Representing the Other: Dante, Duns Scotus, and the Crisis of Representation in the Modern Age,” Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, October 4, 2019 This piece appears in Dante and the Other, ed. Aaron B.  Daniels (New York: Routledge, 2021), 51–71. My thanks for permission to adapt and reemploy. Finally, for critical readings from which the manuscript benefited materially, I am indebted to a handful of outstanding scholars of Dante and much else: Jason Aleksander, Frank Ambrosio, Vittorio Montemaggi, Matthew Rothaus Moser, Gregory Stone, and Chance Woods. The Divine Comedy is cited from La Divina Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, 4  vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1966–​ 67). Throughout the book, the Paradiso is the default text for parenthetical citations by canto and verse. Dante’s “minor” works are cited from Opere minori, 2 vols., ed. A. Frugoni and F. Brugnoli (Milan: Ricciardi, 1979–​88). All translations into English, unless otherwise attributed, are my own.

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Introduction The Theological Apotheosis of Lyric in Dante’s Paradiso  

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1  Self-​Reflexion and Lyricism in the Paradiso

The fundamental logical structure pervading Dante’s poem, and indeed structuring poetry as such, is self-​reflection. Its epitome is lyrical language. The language of lyric actualizes itself as a movement of reflection that entails repetition or return to the self and the same at the levels of sound and formal structure, as well as of meaning or symbolic content. From the most basic constitution of its prosody, including its rhymes and rhythms, poetry consists in enactments of self-​reflection. The same verbal elements—​ phonic, graphic, syntactic, grammatical, and rhetorical—​ repeat themselves. A self-​reflexive logic and dynamic govern the composition of the verse, as well as the patterns of the imagery, the models of narration, and the thematic motives and topoi, whether theological, political, or personal. This concentrated self-​reflectiveness is characteristic of lyrical poetry in general, but it is especially characteristic of the poetry of the Paradiso, where such reflexivity becomes superlatively intense and revealing. The Paradiso’s saturation with effects of self-​reflexion makes it only the more manifestly a quintessence of lyric. Dante’s poem of Paradise incarnates the self-​reflexivity of language in the formal features and sensuous body of song. What is more, these characteristics take on peculiar, even absolute, metaphysical significance in the theological light shed by the Paradiso. The theological arguments and narrative scenarios of the poem turn on figures of self-​reflection that transparently reflect the repetitive structures of its lyrical language. The self-​reflexive being or “glory” of the Trinitarian divinity of Christianity is thematized in the metaphysical argument of the Paradiso from its very first tercet and, in some sense, at least formally, in every rhyming tercet thereafter. God’s oneness is prismatically refracted throughout the diverse multiplicity of the universe (“in una parte più e meno altrove,” I.3), and this outward-​directed emanating into Creation as its reflection only repeats the Godhead’s own internally self-​reflective nature. This same reflexive structure is drammatically projected on an epic scale in the narrative trajectory of return that brings the pilgrim back home to his origin in God and thereby restores his true, original image of himself in the ultimately imageless divine nature.

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4 Introduction Most movingly of all, the poetic logic of self-​reflection is consummated in a theological apotheosis of lyrical language in the poetry of the Paradiso. Theological meaning and poetic form coalesce in the structures of self-​ reflexivity that will be highlighted throughout the following philosophical-​ critical reflections. The two—​ theological meaning and poetic form—​show up as intertwined aspects of language stripped to its lyrical essence. The self-​reflective linguistic structures themselves reflect features of reality as illuminated in its deepest sources by poetic thinking and (negative-​) theological reflection. Of course, lyric as a mode can occur in any genre of literature. Certainly, in narrative poems and even in the prose of novels and essays, as well as in the elevated speech of oratory, there are often passages that are eminently “lyrical.” These passages are consistently found where certain types of repetition in language occur in greatest concentration. Alliteration, assonance, and anaphora, as well as characteristic traits of poetry such as rhythm and rhyme, lend language its lyricism. Such symmetries and self-​reflective mirrorings of sound create a kind of formal music. The etymological sense of the term “lyrical”—​as enshrined in the image of the lyre, lyricus in Latin, from λυρικός in Greek—​is rooted in music. In common usage, accordingly, the term “lyrical” refers especially to musicality that is immediately expressive or reflective of heightened emotion—​ and perhaps also of sharpened perception and inwardly deepened or enhanced cognition of the real. Not only is this lyrical quality of language not limited to any specific literary genre: Dante’s poem, as signaled by its own self-​designation as “comedìa” (Inferno XVI.128; XXI.2), is itself already a mixture of genres, as explained in the Letter to Can Grande (Epistolae XIII.x.28–​ 32). The poem is lyrical or singing from its very first verses in terza rima and all throughout. In the Paradiso, the lyricism of Dante’s epic and prophetic poem, the Commedia, intensifies, just as its narrative and dramatic features, in certain respects, attenuate. Arguably, these latter, more discursive genres of poetry tend to be subsumed under the lyrical mode in Dante’s culminating realization of the richest and purest strains—​or, at any rate, the highest flight—​of his poetic creativity in the Paradiso. Admittedly, the lyricism is thoroughly mingled with didactic discourse in versified prose. This adulteration of the lyrical becomes obtrusive early on with Beatrice’s formidable disquisition on moon spots in the second canto. However, a major ambition of the poem is to unveil the intrinsic beauty of truth and, conversely, disclose truth as the soul of beauty. Nothing is more deliciously lyrical than truth such as Dante tastes and savors it in Paradise. Dante harps insistently on the complete coalescence of beauty and truth from the outset of the canticle. He invokes Apollo as his muse and declares his need for both peaks of Parnassus (I.13–​36) because paradisiacal poetry trades no longer just in beautiful myths and images but is now explicitly a poetry of doctrinal truth and science. Even the dry,

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Self-​Reflexion, Lyricism in Paradiso  5 scientific discourse on moon spots in Canto II discloses “beautiful truth” (“la bella verità”) to Dante and is delivered by a Beatrice figured as “that sun that first warmed my breast to love” (“Quel sol che pria d’amor mi scaldò ’l petto,” III.1–​2). In Paradise, these ostensibly disparate registers of beauty and truth acquire their full resonance and radiance in and through one another. Assisted by this argumentative, discursive foil, Dante’s most concentratedly lyrical and self-​reflexive language presses up against the limit of sense-​making, as language voids or at least brackets its normal informational content in becoming pure music. Linguistic sense and science are distilled and sublated into lyrical rapture. Music, in turn, considered as absolute, borders on silence in evoking the ineffable.1 Lyric consumes itself finally in an experience of becoming one with the divine that transumes and surpasses all human forms of articulation and expression.

Lyric Poetics of Presence through Self-​Reflection in the Paradiso Each of the three canticles of the Divine Comedy features near its opening a significant passage that defines its distinctive poetics. In the Inferno, after the general introduction and preliminaries—​ including protasis, invocation, and a framing of the dramatic action of the poem—​which take up its first two cantos, Canto III opens directly with the inscription over the Gate of Hell. It is relayed in four stanzas of terza rima beginning: “Per me si va ne la città dolente, /​per me si va ne l’etterno dolore, /​per me si va tra la perduta gente” (“Through me one goes into the city of pain, /​through me one enters eternal anguish, /​through me one goes among the lost souls”). These words are presented at the canto’s outset without any form of mediation such as a discursive link or narrative transition. The effect of this abruptness is that the reader directly confronts, written in the text, exactly the same letters as Dante the protagonist sees inscribed on the infernal archway. In this performative manner, the text throws into relief the realistic mimesis that serves as its characteristic poetic mode. The Inferno claims to record what Dante as eyewitness saw (“ciò ch’io vidi,” II.8) and directly or immediately experienced. In comparison, the Purgatorio presents a reflectively interiorized realm of dream and imagination filtered through aesthetic transfigurations via the arts—​plastic, pictorial, architectural, musical, rhetorical, etc. Its dominant poetic mode is allegory, in which reality is represented as veiled by images and as mediated by interpretive paradigms of cultural tradition. In Canto II of Purgatorio, the Exodus is evoked via Psalm 113 (In 1 This broad theoretical problematic is elucidated by Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Musique et Silence,” in La musique et l’ineffable (Paris: Seuil, 1983; originally Paris: A. Colin, 1961), 161–​90, trans. Carolyn Abbate, “Music and Silence” in Music and the Ineffable (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 130–​55.

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6 Introduction exitu Isräel de Aegypto, II.46) sung in choral unison by souls arriving on board an angelic ferry at the shore of the mountain, where they will begin their purgation. Psalm 113 is a liturgical exemplum that calls for figural interpretation by the fourfold method of Scriptural allegoresis that Dante lays out in Convivio II.i.2–​15. The traditional story of the Exodus figures in the text of Purgatorio explicitly as “written” (“scripto,” II.48). The navigator angel (“celestial nocchiero,” II.43) ferrying the souls is itself “inscribed” as “blessed” (“beato per iscripto,” II.44). Its blessedness is a written figure. In all these ways, its textual mediation is built into the scene and foregrounded. This emblematic angel is endowed, moreover, with “eternal pinions” (“etterne penne,” 35)  that are interpretable alternatively as “pens.” These superhuman aviational means are overdetermined as meaning-​bearing “arguments” (“argumenti,” 31). In the Purgatorio, the Scriptural mode of typological poetics relies on messengers (angels) and on symbolic media of aestheticizing representation as characteristic expedients. True reality is not presented directly to the eyes and the other senses as a bald fact but is imaged, instead, via exemplary figures and types embedded in texts unfolding in dramatic scenarios. Hence also the sacred rite acted out in the valley of the princes (Purgatorio VII) and the biblical pagent performed in the terrestrial paradise (Purgatorio XXIX). Symbolic dreams, furthermore, serve as allegorical foreshadowings that punctuate Dante’s days and nights in Purgatory at intervals of approximately nine cantos each: Dante dreams of the eagle snatching Ganymede in IX; of the Siren figure at the opening of XIX; and of the Scriptural types Lea and Rachel in XXVII. In all these ways, Purgatorio constantly emphasizes subjective, symbolic, artistic, and scriptural mediation. The poetics of the Paradiso, in contrast, return once more to a sort of immediacy, but it is not the immediacy of a purportedly literal, referential reality, as in the Inferno. Instead, it is the immediacy of the linguistic medium itself. The Paradiso’s language is peculiarly designed not so much to represent Paradise as to presence it—​to render it palpable as a sensuous plenitude in the experience of poetic language itself. The experience of Paradise is what no language can objectively describe or represent. The ineffability topos relentlessly insists on this from the beginning to the end of the cantica. The language of Paradise can no longer refer to or represent its highest and most proper object (divinity, the Absolute). The Paradiso can rely neither on direct realism nor on allegorical signification. It must, instead, create an experience of the Absolute in language—​especially through the breakdown of language at the limits of its expressive powers. This is a kind of return to immediacy, but of a different order and at a higher level. The immediately perceptible objects presented throughout the canticle are metaphors of a heightened, invisible reality that is effulgently present and yet, at the same time, sublimely out of reach. This is illustrated strikingly and effectively in the Heaven of Jove, particularly in Paradiso XVIII.70–​136, with the spectacular display

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Self-​Reflexion, Lyricism in Paradiso  7 of written language, specifically Scripture—​ DILIGITE IUSTITIAM—​ blazoned across the scene of the heaven. This vision features letters and their composition and explosion as a kind of fireworks made up of ensembles of soul-​ sparks flashing written characters “painted” (“dipinto”) on the canvas of the heaven. The divine love “was there” (“l’amor che lì era”) and yet still only in the form of writing, which entails and foregrounds difference and distance.2 Language signifies by difference, not by positive, absolute terms. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–​ 1913) demonstrates this magisterially in texts that remain indispensable for modern linguistics and language theory, but the crucial insights were already well known to Dante and to the highly sophisticated medieval semiological science to which he was heir.3 Most importantly, Dante knows theologically that he must go beyond significant speech and representation altogether in order to convey something of the ultimate experience of God, since God is without difference and is, strictly speaking, unsignifiable. Dante cannot represent God as an object. He can only imitate absolute being in poetic language that takes language to the zero degree of representation in producing, instead, a dynamic, self-​reflexive presence in language itself. Most basically, it is by repeating sounds of the same vowel or consonant in patterns of alliteration and assonance that poetic language calls attention to its own being as language. By concentrating self-​reflexive verbal structures of repetition of the same—​as with the same sounds and measures repeated in rhythm and rhyme—​poetic language affirms itself as an immediate sensory presence in its own right rather than only serving as a vehicle or medium of representation. Such self-​referentiality of language characterizes the “poetic function” as theorized by Roman Jakobson and as exemplified by the slogan “I like Ike,” which calls attention to language itself.4 By such means, language makes itself felt for its own positive, tangible qualities. It is not just a conveyance for content of another nature, being itself reduced to a self-​erasing vehicle. It is not just a transparent medium for its object. Instead, language imposes a viscous being—​an ontological density—​of its own. Modern poetry considered very broadly has continued in this quest to realize its being in and as the presence of language itself. This insight, expressed in the simplest, stripped-​down terms, lurks within Archibald McLeish’s well-​known prescription for poetry: “A poem should not mean /​But be” (“Ars Poetica”).

2  I interpret this passage in “Scripture as Theophany in Dante’s Paradiso,” Religion and Literature 39/​2 (2007): 1–​32. 3  Rita Copeland and Ineka Sluiter, in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory AD 13–​1475 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), provide translations of source texts from this vast tradition. 4  Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 350–​77. Citation 357.

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8 Introduction An intensively lyrical poetics of presence in the Paradiso is felt fully and is brought to the center of attention in Dante’s first encounter with souls in Paradise. Specifically the presentation in Canto III of the barely discernible faces of the souls appearing in the Heaven of the Moon, with its emphatically alliterative and assonantal diction, makes the language of poetry itself a hauntingly audible presence. This passage defines the characteristic poetic mode of the third cantica in parallel with the already-​noted programmatic passages near the outset of the previous two canticles that establish and illustrate their respective poetic modes. Quali per vetri trasparenti e tersi,   o ver per acque nitide e tranquille,   non si profonde che i fondi sien persi, tornan de’ nostri visi le postille  debili sì, che perla in bianca fronte  non vien men tosto a le nostre pupille … .5 (Paradiso III.10–​15)

(As in transparent and polished glass,   or in pure and tranquil waters,   not so deep that the bottoms vanish, the reflected images of our faces return   so weak that pearl on a white forehead   does not strike our pupils more … .) The faces here are at risk of being effaced: they are nearly imperceptible, for lack of sufficient differentiation against their background. The distinct appearance of faces and forms throughout most of Paradise is on the verge of being blended out by the overwhelming presence of pure, metaphysical being, with its dazzlingly refulgent light. Analogously, the binary differences on which meaning in language is based tend to be erased through language’s occurring not as a means of reference so much as an immediate presence. Language itself, by its concrete presence in its poetic function, upstages and outshines the differentiated contents that it only indirectly represents by means of its referential function. Such language evokes and even enacts an undifferentiated presence of the divine.

Narcissus and the Reality of Reflection The fact that apparently reflected images prompt this effacement—​and that self-​ reflective lyric language performs pure presence—​ places this canticle under the sign of Narcissus. The sequel, in direct continuation 5  I add emphasis to highlight certain sound patterns.

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Self-​Reflexion, Lyricism in Paradiso  9 from the text just cited, highlights this connection thematically by an express allusion to the Ovidian myth: tal vid’io più facce a parlar pronte:   per ch’io dentro a l’error contrario corsi   a quel ch’accese amor tra l’omo e ’l fonte. Sùbito sì com’io di lor m’accorsi,   quelle stimando specchiati sembianti,   per veder di cui fosser, li occhi torsi … .

                  (III.16–​ 21)

(I saw such multiple faces ready to speak:   for which reason I fell into the error contrary to that   which ignited love between the man and the fountain. Suddenly, as soon as I was aware of them,   thinking them to be mirrored semblances,   in order to see who they were, I turned back my eyes … .) Instead of the vain, deluded love of Narcissus for his own image, as in Ovid, Dante refers here to an ardent love “between” the “man” and the “fountain.” Reflection of the self and same is narcissistic, but it need not be immature, erroneous, or steril. It can also be generative of new life by reflectively connecting with its source or fountainhead (“fonte”). In this instance, the love ignited “between the man and the fountain” is described as reciprocal and potentially fertile. Dante dignifies Narcissus to the status of a “man” and transfers the immaturity of adolescence from Ovid’s youthful character to Dante himself, chided by Beatrice for his “puerile infatuation” (“püeril cotto,” 26) as he commits the error contrary to Narcissus’s. We can begin to discern here a program of redeeming Narcissus that will be brought out fully later (in section 14) by comparing the thirtieth cantos of each cantica. In Christian theology, after all, God is the first Narcissist by virtue of his love for his own perfect image, his Son (Colossians 1:15; 2 Corinthians 4:4). This Love between the first two persons of the Trinity is further reflected in the Holy Spirit, who is truly a person, a hypostasis or substance, in “herself” (to echo ancient Christian pneumatologies gendering the Spirit as feminine). In the context of the Paradiso, this argument includes a claim that in Paradise signs take on substantial reality through reflection of the self and the same infused from on high with a spirit of engendering love. Dante takes the images he sees to be only “mirrored semblances” (“specchiati sembianti,” III.20), but he is brusquely corrected by Beatrice: they are, in fact, “true substances” (“vere sustanze,” III.29). Dante mistakes substances for mere signs. Signs or images in Paradise may be infirmed in their ability to signify, since the reality in question is supersensible and beyond representation, but what they are is significant beyond their power to say what that significance is. In the end, the very substance

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10 Introduction of paradisiacal being is to be nothing but the divine being reflected back upon itself. Thus Dante’s gazing at the substances before him and his taking them for mere reflected images is an inversion of the error committed by Narcissus, who took a mere image to be the real thing. Typical of artists is the error of taking their own image or creation to be real, but Dante’s Paradise presents images that are substantive revelations of a higher reality. The images before him are not just a poet’s figment or phantom: they are rather means of access to true and absolute reality. Dante is emphatic that what appear to him are “true substances,” real presences. There is here an erasure of difference between appearances and reality because the invisible realities in question cannot as such appear as visible things. It is not as if there were some other visible thing to be seen standing behind him when Dante looks back over his shoulder. Dante, as character, makes the mistake of looking with his eyes for other persons behind the images that he deems to be their reflections, but in truth there is no one else. The images he sees and that talk to him are not representations of persons elsewhere, in another time or place. Instead, the real and (sempi)eternal persons are talking with him in and through these shapes and forms. They are real, substantial persons rather than just representations, and yet the persons in question cannot simply be identified with the phenomenal forms through which they are manifest. This is impossible because the very dichotomy of the real and the represented, the substantial and the accidental, is suspended and transcended by the being of the blessed. Their reality is to be one with God. However, they reflect the divine reality in varying degrees that can be illustrated in differentiated forms, which is exactly what the remainder of the canto goes on to explain and illustrate. Seeing the blessed is seeing absolute reality, the Infinite, refracted in finite form. The notion of degrees of reality becomes a crucial concept in philosophy at precisely this moment of cultural history in the work of John Duns Scotus (1265/​66–​1308). A major task of Part II of this book will be to show how Dante employs a new logic of representation in negotiating the relation of transcendence and immanence in ways that parallel and are illuminated by the philosophical reflection and metaphysical speculation of Scotus. Dante’s poetic thinking hails from the same cultural predicament in a newly critical age, with its novel resources and insights, yet Dante’s approach manifests also very revealing differences from Scotus’s. Scotus clears the path toward the development of modern science, whereas Dante’s poetic language opens new vistas for the humanities. Dante’s perspective develops along a genealogical line different from the mainstream producing our technical-​scientific modernity. It evolves eventually into a kind of alternative Enlightenment based on an epistemology essentially poetic rather than numeric in nature. Parts II–​V will trace this line through Nicholas of Cusa to Giambattista Vico and beyond.

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Self-​Reflexion, Lyricism in Paradiso  11

Metaphorical Poetics of Invisible Presence Some of the most recent, well-​informed, and astute critics today, ones writing from the point of arrival of vast traditions of commentary, consider Dante’s claim that he sees “true substances” to be meant not with all precision and earnestness and indeed to be “misleading.”6 It seems to contradict Beatrice’s statement a little later in the next canto that the true dwelling place of all the blessed is in the Empyrean (IV.28–​36). Beatrice explains there that the souls have only appeared in the heaven of the moon for Dante’s sake—​in order to signify (“far segno”) to him the nature and degree of their blessedness. What such criticism overlooks or underplays is the transcendence of determinate, objective vision by paradisiacal vision of all things in God. Dante in Paradise is “seeing” (however dimly and partially) souls as they truly are in the view of God, and this transcends every kind of physical, phenomenal form. This is indeed to see their “true substance,” just as Dante says, but this true being of theirs cannot be limited to any given time or physical space. It is “ultra-​substantial” in terms of the ordinary substances with which we are acquainted empirically. As we learn more clearly later, for the blessed souls to be “in” the Empyrean is to be outside of time and space. Saint Benedict in the heaven of the contemplatives mentions that the Empyrean “is not localized and does not turn on a pole” (“non è in loco e non s’impola,” XXII.67). Dante invents a metaphorical construct for spatially imagining what it is to see a purely spiritual reality. Admittedly, the forms he sees are but metaphors. Yet what he really “sees”—​albeit metaphysically and metaphorically—​is the invisible substance of the souls and ultimately an aspect or expression of the only absolutely true substance, God. The “appearances” are metaphors not in the sense of being something other than this one substance, but rather of being invisible Being itself that is signified under a certain visible aspect and from a certain perspective. The apparently reflected images are not what Dante “really” “sees.” They simply give local habitation and a form to something that is not physical at all. Dante’s “vision” here is rather of an invisible reality. In his medieval outlook, what is empirically verifiable by material sight and the senses is only a shadow of the absolute reality of “true substance.” The Letter to Cangrande explains that by intellect we see many things for which verbal signs are lacking (“Multa namque per intellectum videmus quibus signa vocalia desunt,” Epistola XIII.84). It finds this predicament confirmed by Plato’s resort to the use of metaphors for what is seen by the light of the intellect—​what words are not able properly to express (“quod satis Plato insinuate in suis libris per assumptionem metaphorismorum;

6 Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez, eds., Paradiso (New  York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 76.

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12 Introduction multa enim per lumen intellectual vidit que sermone proprio nequivit exprimere,” Epistola XIII.84). For Aristotle, all our cognition, and consequently signs, come only from sensible things (“nihil in intellecto nisi prius in senso”). But Paradise proper (the Empyrean) is not sensible, even though Dante signifies his experience of it by sensible images. Even God uses such images to convey to Dante’s understanding the state of the souls he encounters. Dante did not at first realize that he was seeing true substantial reality, since what appeared to him were still at least marginally sensible forms, but Beatrice corrects him. He sees invisible substances in sensible forms in the first heaven and all through his ascent, even in the Empyrean. What changes is the way—​more than what—​he sees. Beatrice gives him to understand that the form of appearance is merely an accommodation to his human faculties (IV.28–​63). In fact, the whole cosmological ascent through the nine physical heavens is an accommodation for making visible an experience of invisible reality. The faces might, to this extent, be called “absolute metaphors.”7 They bring into being something that exists as a perceptible thing only in and through themselves rather than referring indirectly to something other than themselves. What is alluded to in the absolute metaphors of the Paradiso, finally, is reality as absolute and therefore as ungraspable and ineffable, not a discrete quality or a definable, isolable thing at all. Poetic metaphor in Paradise is ultimately a means of evoking undifferentiated and unsignifiable divinity. This entails, for example, that the visibility of the souls in Paradise is blinding, as becomes explicit in the case of Justinian in V.133–​39. They are seen only enough to suggest something unseen that is the true nature of their substance. All that Dante actually sees as determinate form, even in the Empyrean, consists only in “shadowy prefaces of their truth” (“di lor vero umbriferi prefazii,” XXX.78). Dante dramatizes such exposure of vision as a veil over true reality when he arrives in the Empyrean. His eyes are flooded with living divine light “shining all around” (“circunfulse,” recalls Saint Paul’s blinding vision in Acts 22:6), and it enables them to surmount their own powers (XXX.49–​ 57). He sees a river of light with sparks rising from and returning to flowers on its banks. But after he drinks the river in with his eyelids, in order to make his eyes better mirrors (“per far migliori spegli,” 85), the scene metamorphoses. The river becomes round (90) and his vision is reshaped as his perspective is rounded from that of linear time into eternity modeled as a spherical amphitheater. The sparks and flowers are “unmasked” (“sotto larve … manifeste,” etc., 91–​96) as the “two courts” of heaven—​angels and blessed souls. Of course, these forms 7  Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie—​Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 6 (1960): 7–​142; 301–​5 is the source of much reflection on the idea of absolute metaphor. For application to Dante, see Marco Ariani, “ ‘Metafore assolute’: Emanazionismo e sinestesie della luce fluente,” La metafora in Dante, ed. Marco Ariani (Florence: Olschki, 2009), 193–​219.

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Self-​Reflexion, Lyricism in Paradiso  13 for describing the substances he sees are again metaphors for what is in itself infinite and formless. Only letting determinate form disappear can intimate divine simplicity. Dante wants to honor the distinct reality of the persons he meets, even though ultimately their reality is to be one with God. Still, this oneness is a free act and not simply a fact. Every individual has to freely will to be (re)made in the divine image. It is not a simple given that is flatly perceived but an eternal act of total giving of oneself. It is a self-​reflective act of letting absolute being be reflected in one’s own finite being by relinquishing to the core all particular ownership even of oneself. We have the ability to really let God be—​in ourselves. Still, what causes confusion is that we are used to reasoning about individuals as if they were fully independent substances, whereas in Dante’s Christian metaphysics all that exists, except God, is dependent being. All distinguishing traits, at this ultimate ontological level, where all being derives from God, disappear as merely modes of the realization of the one true substance. Dante is juggling with just such a minimal, disappearing, virtually invisible difference in the passage quoted above as Leitmotif, in which he sees what seem to be apparitions of faces. These are the first appearances to him of the denizens of Paradise, and Dante’s description says something about the nature of description itself as it applies to such beings or “substances.” Dante marks here a minimal, barely perceptible difference of pearl on a white forehead (“perla in bianca fronte”) in order to evoke the moment in which difference disappears altogether because it is the moment in which the divine Absolute “appears.” Eternity, or divinity, can only be experienced mystically in the erasure of difference between the mind and its object, which in this case is the mind’s divine Source and Ground. Such is the self-​transcending realized through the unio mystica. This metaphysical event has been apprehended as a purely poetic experience, for example, by Arthur Rimbaud, that “mystic in the savage state” (“mystique à l’état sauvage”), as Paul Claudel dubbed him in the Préface to his 1912 edition of Rimbaud’s Oeuvres. Rimbaud’s “Éternité” portrays the exquisite moment of erasure of difference that issues in mystic rapture, when the sea, vanishing with the sun, suddenly dissappears into the night: Elle est retrouvée Quoi? L’éternité. C’est la mer allée Avec le soleil.8 (It is found again What? Eternity. 8  Arthur Rimbaud, Poésies complètes, ed. P. Claudel (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 5.

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14 Introduction It is the sea gone With the sun.) Rimbaud imagines a moment at which, with the setting of the sun and the disappearance of light, there is no longer any perceptible difference on the horizon of the visual field, no line of demarcation between sea and sky, but simply an undifferentiated All. The speaker is reimmersed without difference in something like what Dante calls “the great sea of being” (“’l gran mar de l’essere,” I.113). Dante is borrowing the image of the sea (“pelagus”) for the Divine Being, or “He Who Is,” from John of Damascene (De fide orthodoxa 9). The image is relayed to him presumably by Thomas Aquinas in his commentary On the Sentences of Peter Lombard: “Thus Damascene does not say what God is but signifies a certain sea of infinite substance as indeterminate” (“et ideo dicit Damascenus, quod non significat quid est Deus, sed significat quoddam pelagus substantiae infinitum, quasi non determinatum”).9 The sea is an image signifying not exactly what God is so much as suggesting that he is beyond determinate signification (“non determinatum”). The poem, like language in general, can speak and signify only by virtue of difference, but its divine “object” is without difference and so is not even distinguishable as an object. It is like Rimbaud’s sea—​ vanished along with the setting sun. Scripturally, this recalls “the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17, echoed by Dante in Convivio IV.xx.6). Thus, from its outset, in defining its peculiar poetic mode, Paradiso envisages the erasure of even the minimal difference necessary to signify something. Dante repeatedly employs figures of vanishing linguistic difference, for example, in describing the emptiness of broken vows by virtually the same word in Piccarda’s explanation that her “vows” (“voti”) were “void” (“vòti”) in some respect (“li nostri voti e vòti in alcun canto,” III.57). Again, when Beatrice tells Dante to “say, say” (“Dì, dì”) his question and to believe the souls as gods (“dii”), whatever they answer (“Dì, dì /​sicuramente, e credi come a dii,” V.122–​23), these acoustically equivalent locutions show language losing its grip on the differences between things by using similar and virtually indistinguishable signifiers for them. Joan Ferrante delineates Dante’s use of such verbal coincidences and homonym rhymes, or repetition of words with different, often subtly gradated shades of meaning, to suggest the deep unity of things beyond their apparent differences.10 Dante thereby imitates the unity of diversity, the intricate connection of all in God, declared from the outset of the Paradiso. 9  Super I Sent. Distinctio 8, q.I, a.I. Sancti Thomae de Aquino Scriptum super Sententiis (Parma edition, 1856). www.corpusthomisticum.org/​snp1008.html. Accessed March 15, 2017. 10  Joan M. Ferrante, “Words and Images in the Paradiso: Reflections of the Divine,” Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton,

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Self-​Reflexion, Lyricism in Paradiso  15 Such language that verges upon indistinction suggests how in general the distinctions between things made by language are relative and highly labile. These distinctions marked by virtually identical signifiers become discernible only self-​reflexively. Like a spark moving within flame or voice within voice (“E come in fiamma favilla si vede, /​e come in voce voce si discerne, /​quand’una è ferma e altra va e riede,” VIII.16–​18), the poem vibrates as the purely self-​reflexive difference of same from same that is made by artifice so as to metaphorically signify the unsignifiable, the absolutely undifferentiated. In the deepest core of reality—​in God—​ there is no difference. These subtle verbal plays are possible in the living language of the vernacular more than in Latin, given the latter’s comparative rigidity, which suggests one reason why Dante shifts to Latin when mentioning what he cannot express: “Trasumanar significar per verba /​ non si porìa,” I. 70 (“Transhumanizing cannot be expressed per verba”). In the apparitions at the outset of Canto III, Dante describes forms that tenuously take shape by virtue of lyrical repetition. The persons here are presences and even real presences. Still, they appear evanescent and vanishing because their true reality is not identical with their visible form. Yet neither do these forms signify something else in the manner of an allegorical representation. They are traces of real presences of something that cannot be phenomenally manifest as such. Their real presence is in the Empyrean, but that means nowhere in space and time. So their apparent spatial location is merely a “condescending” to Dante’s subjective limitations (IV.28–​48), not an objective reality. They are not in any place that can be objectively signified. What appears to Dante is indicative of a wholly different order of reality—​“true substance”—​one not in space and time at all. It is more appropriate to speak of metaphor than of allegory for Dante’s technique in the Paradiso, since the images he uses are mediated through subjective experience instead of consisting in strictly objective relations among orders of things. In this respect, Dante is anticipating modern perspectives and poetics. His metaphors are subjective, perspectival ways of relating to an ultimate reality. The shapes that Dante sees are metaphors for an ineffable and indeterminable reality. They all take shape against the background of God, who is absolutely unrepresentable. The “what” that is indicated remains a mystery. Julia Kristeva constructs a genealogy of Western subjectivity in its derivation from Neoplatonic and Christian interpretations of the Narcissus myth.11 She suggests that what Dante the character initially rejects as merely narcissistic images—​ such as poets are notoriously prone to produce—​are rehabilitated by Beatrice. Dante’s theologically enlightened guide presents images as true realities belonging to this realm in which ed. Aldo S.  Bernardo and Anthony L.  Pellegrini (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983), 115–​32, especially 125–​26. 11  Julia Kristeva, Histoires d’amour (Paris: Denöel[Folio], 1983), 164–​66.

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16 Introduction “light” itself, the divine, becomes the substantial reality of the souls. The images Dante sees reveal to him the truly real that he is journeying toward, and they make up the progressive stages of his journey beyond the visible world to the experientially revealed truth of an invisible reality. For Dante, as a subject advancing in his knowledge of the reality of God, Beatrice’s mediation is essential. She alone authorizes taking these images not as narcissistic illusions reflecting just himself, but rather as indicators of the reality of the Other toward which he is summoned. Dante’s employment of allegorical invention had climaxed already at the end of the Purgatorio with the apocalyptic scenes unfolding from XXXII.106 to XXXIII.78. The Paradiso continues Dante’s journey beyond apocalyptic representation and its disclosures into the realm of the unrepresentable and unrevealable. It seems that only self-​reflexivity can fathom and express the shadow of this realm (“l’ombra del beato regno”) that is “etched” in Dante’s “head” (“segnato nel mio capo,” I.23–​24). In the Paradiso, Dante represents no separate object per se but rather a reflective redoubling and projection out of himself in contact with an absolute reality. This turns the protagonist into a living, transfigured incarnation of the invisible world—​a transcendent Other. Such is the putatively miraculous experience that gives rise to the metaphorical renderings of Paradise.

From Formalist Poetics to the Paradise of Poetic Language I have described Dante’s lyric poetics as based on foregrounding language and on its calling attention to itself. This view derives from the broadly formalist conceptions that were given their most influential formulation by Jakobson. It leaves its mark on theoretical approaches to the poetics of the Paradiso such as Freccero’s and Dragonetti’s (see especially sections 5–​11 below). I wish to give a different turn, with a theological twist, to this formalist view of Dante’s poetics and even in certain respects to reverse it into a kind of hyper-​realist poetics. While calling attention to itself as language in some sense undermines referential or conceptual content, Dante’s language in the Paradiso is absolutely precise and painstaking in its conceptual elaborations. The commentaries (Hollander’s preeminently) show how every inflection of Dante’s language has a conceptual history behind it and implies a whole program of cultural convictions and ideological commitments. Every minute turn of Dante’s phrasing, and all of his lexical elections and inventions, evoke endless worlds of conception and belief as standing outside of or beyond the poem and as informing it. Perceiving this intricate conceptual structure is crucial to the incomparable experience of reading the Paradiso and understanding the matchlessly rare and subtle impressions it awakes. Nevertheless, we must learn to perceive this realm of reference as projected from the poem itself rather than as ready-​made and preceding it. Everything, as it appears in the poem, is given from a conceptual

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Self-​Reflexion, Lyricism in Paradiso  17 creation that the poem itself engenders and that actualizes Paradise as the immediate experience of divine presence. Dante’s Paradiso reveals the poetic word as the creative origin of language and therewith of the world as conceived and humanly experienced. This creativity cannot be experienced by referring merely to existing objects, but only in the creative event of language itself. In this event, the divine presence becomes palpable as Paradise. Dante’s careful conceptual elaborations give his language a sense of stability as anchored to a reality that is beyond language. This reality, however, is not that of the empirical world of distinct, finite objects around us. In terms of such things and our perceptions and articulations of them, the ultimate reality of Paradise can only be indeterminate, for it is infinite. The reality of Paradise is also perfectly unified or one and therefore inexpressible. Not the differential articulations we apprehend in Dante’s concepts themselves (which are always only provisional), but the more mysterious and ineffable source of them—​the source of all stability and dynamism—​is ultimately the reality in question. The poem opens access to—​or puts us in touch with—​this otherwise unsuspected domain of ineffable simplicity. It is a referential world that is opened up by language—​but as independent of language and as superlatively real. It is a higher reality that is more true and constant than the world we apprehend in the things around us as perceived by our senses. Symbolically, such a higher reality is aptly represented as “Paradise.” But taken as prior to representation and its fictions, and apart from any myths of an other world, the functioning of language in Dante’s poem is itself an original (re)making of the world as turned toward and open to an unfathomable otherness of things that we inevitably miss in our ordinary experience of them. Dante’s own theory of poetic language stresses stability, which he takes to be a natural telos and criterion of the nobility of language (Convivio I.v.7). It is achieved by tying words together in verse (De vulgari eloquentia II.iii.2–​3; Convivio IV.vi.3–​4). In the Paradiso, this stability becomes something uncanny. It is not just a relative power of endurance in time, such as Statius attributes to the name of the poet (“quel nome che più dura e più onora,” Purgatorio XX1.85). It is a supra-​temporal power of disclosing a reality that underlies everything and “gives” it to be, as philosophers say with enriched meaning after the theological turn in phenomenology (see section 24). Beyond the temporal fluctuations of language itself—​and even because of them—​poetic language in the vernacular is able to evoke a changeless reality, or, more exactly, a reality beyond change, one that can be encompassed by no finite terms and that cannot as such be articulated. This higher reality of Paradise is discerned by the disclosures made through poetic language. So whenever I stress the erasure of referentiality effected through lyrical language, the emphasis is actually on another, richer, fuller reality beyond all empirical entities and separately definable essences. It opens up and is entered into by

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18 Introduction conceptual elaboration—​yet it is posited as existing prior to and independently of Dante’s language of Paradise because it norms that very language. The world articulated by the language of Paradise is but the trace or witness of another, inarticulable, ineffable reality. In the formal register that will be developed and analyzed philosophically in Part II, making a poem, with its ideal descriptions, can be a way of discerning a higher and more abiding reality. This method works largely by Dante’s making conceptual distinctions, but not as if they were just made up. He claims to interpret an authoritative revelation of how things really are. Most importantly, that Paradise is at all as an object for our experience or discernment first comes into view through discourse. Yet what counts finally are not the distinctions Dante actually details—​for example, between those born before the institution of circumcision or after the sacrament of baptism, to parents with or without faith, etc.—​ but his orientation to an authority above him that really can make such distinctions. Its reasons for granting life or death, salvation or punishment, nevertheless, reach beyond our understanding. This is to understand oneself as really connected to and ruled by a higher source that is not of one’s own creation—​even though this understanding itself results precisely from a realization of freedom in one’s own creative activity in responding to a higher, ineffable inspiration. The ability of language to make distinctions and to forge conceptions is itself revelatory. It is not the world of empirical things in which language functions pragmatically that is revealed, but a higher reality without differences from which this world devolves. The distinctions made by language and concept come not as derived from the world of empirical things, but as grounding it in another realm truer than all such things. I work with and from versions of formalist theory of poetic language in this book, and I will continue to deploy some of its insights, but I turn them in a direction that is not envisaged by the usually secular models of such critical theory. As employed in the Paradiso, language works above all as a vehicle for the discernment of the reality of Paradise. The reality of Paradise is “substantial,” not merely empty form or pretense. Dante’s language in the Paradiso shows us this better than any other work I know of or can imagine. Dante builds on the Bible and on classical and vernacular poets, and he brings out the uncanny capacities latent in their languages. He shows fully what poetry on an epic scale, flushed with prophetic purport and lyrical intensity, has always aspired to be and do. The fact that poetry can project a kind of ideal world—​in this case, Paradise—​through poetic metaphor is not a new discovery. But Dante finds or invents some unprecedented ways to “make” this Paradise real and not just a formal construction or fantasy. What is so extraordinary is that, by making formal distinctions, poetic language becomes a disclosure of a higher and more stable world, one more undeniably real than any reality to which we otherwise have access. Dante’s language suspends or diverts ordinary reference to external

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Self-​Reflexion, Lyricism in Paradiso  19 objects in order to restore reference on another level—​to an otherwise inaccessible and largely unsuspected order of things. His language is suspended upon and supported by a reality that, without this language, could not be perceived as existing at all. His language is drawn up in the wake of a world that it itself first renders discernible as other than any world of perceived differences defined in language—​as preexisting language and as underwriting all its distinctions. This uncanny dimension of a higher reality discerned by self-​reflexive form will be brought into focus in Part II through comparison with Duns Scotus’s discovery of a comparable kind of formal reality. The ensuing Parts will then follow this self-​reflexive philosophical insight forward to our own times.

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2  Orientation to Philosophical Logics and Rhetorics of Self-​Reflexivity

Self-​reflexivity is inherent in the structure of language itself. It is the condition by virtue of which language becomes a means of arresting phenomena and breaking down their uninterrupted flux into intelligible categories and articulable units. Return to the same or “re-​flection”—​ literally “folding back”—​is necessary in order to mark and identify anything as something. A determinate object can be grasped as defined and abiding only through some kind of repetition or reflective reiteration of its determinate content or identity.1 Language is a reflective medium that specularly projects qualities or characteristics as entities so as to grasp them in the stable and perduring—​but also, for that very reason, relatively static—​terms of codified discourse. A kind of ersatz eternity is produced by language through its powers of abstraction, which reflect phenomena out of temporal flux. By this means, language produces the world as more than just inarrestable flux, as Friedrich Nietzsche, for one, observed in his characteristically “untimely” reflections on the inherent and unlimited (though also veiled and neglected) metaphoricity of language.2 What language produces is fully realized in a world or represented realm that projects the results of language as preceding it, even though this realm is first conceivable only in and by means of language. If language, then, has created this illusion of stability represented ultimately in the idea of eternity, does that make the idea of eternity false and mendacious? Nominalists that we are today, we are tempted to think that what is real is a world of concrete empirical phenomena given before language. The implication is that the realm of essences that language projects out of its own internal relations or self-​reflections is only virtual

1  Catherine Pickstock, Repetition and Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), in a kindred project, develops an original reflection on “non-​identical repetition” in intense critical dialogue with contemporary French philosophy (Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou, Meillassoux et al.), but also amply nourished by medieval metaphysics. 2  Friedrich Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne,” Werke, ed. G. Colli (Berlin: De Gruyter 1980), 367–​84, trans. as “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-​ Moral Sense,” http://​oregonstate.edu/​instruct/​phl201/​modules/​Philosophers/​Nietzsche/​ Truth_​and_​Lie_​in_​an_​Extra-​Moral_​Sense.htm. Accessed July 28, 2020.

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Orientation to Philosophical Logics  21 and really—​or existentially—​nothing. But this is to forget that the action of language is already presupposed in individuating and differentiating the phenomena of the empirical world in the first place. Consequently, the world is nothing that is simply given or that we can have a hold on independently of language. We have been duped into assuming that we could look at the world in itself rather than always only through the lens of language. Philosophers as differently oriented as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Wilhelm von Humboldt all agree in maintaining that the world is itself given to us only in and through language. But this means that the world’s origins remain as mysterious as the origin of language itself. Furthermore, there is nothing that is simply, concretely, and determinately given apart from and outside of or anterior to language. That language predetermines the real is a conviction shared by the main currents of phenomenological, hermeneutic, and post-​structuralist thought pursued in continental philosophy today.3 Dante’s medieval understanding likewise sees everything that is through the lens of language. Theologically, all is created by the Word. From such a perspective emerges a sort of logic of language that is the same as, or at least homologous to, a logic that is to be found paradigmatically in theological thought about God—​“theo-​logics,” we might say, adopting a certain rhetoric of religion.4 Across the spectrum of monotheisms, God is all and in all (to echo I  Corinthians 15:28). Thelogically, nothing can be said or thought—​or even be—​outside of God. God is reflected internally to everything. This postulate echoes in the Paradiso’s celebration of that truth “outside of which no truth ranges” (“’l ver … di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia,” IV.124–​26). Something of this same inescapability marks the nature of language, too. Whatever it says about the world outside itself is always also a reflection of its own saying. Such is the ubiquitousness of self-​reflection—​in language and divinity alike. This self-​reflexive logic inherent in language is not at all the logic of the logicians but rather a poetic logic such as Giambattista Vico discerns and elicits as characteristic of the tradition of the humanities (section 53). In language, all true knowing can only be of what human beings themselves have made. Vico calls this the verum-​factum principle. He is relaying certain essential insights from ancient rhetorical tradition and its thinking in and through language. This tradition is reconstructed and revalorized philosophically by Ernesto Grassi.5 But it has typically been

3 A lucid digest of such epoch-​making ideas in language philosophy is Erich Heintel, Einführung in die Sprachphilosophie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991 [1972]). 4 The parallels between “logology” and theology are explored by Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970 [1961]). 5 Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980).

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22 Introduction ignored by modern philosophical thinking in the analytic and empiricist (and now cognitivist) modes intent on knowledge of things themselves free from all the accumulations of tradition handed down in words. Such a motivation drove the Cartesian project inaugurating modern rationalist philosophy under the aegis of a refoundation of knowledge based on the pure, conscious intuition of self—​a knowledge supposedly disabused of all the prejudices of tradition passed down by verbal means. All such discursive knowledge was suspended and placed under a veil of methodological doubt. It was held in abeyance, pending verification by direct first-​ person, self-​ reflexive experience. What the Cartesian cogito did, especially as applied by secular-​minded Cartesians, was to appropriate the structure of self-​reflection for the subject itself and erase all others to which or whom the self might be beholden. Self-​reflection was recognized as the ultimate ground of the real, but it had become fundamentally an act of the human subject rather than of the divine Mind.6 Recent decades have seen a number of revivals of rhetorical approaches to thinking and arguing, approaches that give precedence to the word and that surrender pretensions to any pre-​verbal access to the knowledge of things. The “new rhetoric” of French literary critics and linguistic thinkers—​ la nouvelle rhetorique—​ was a seminal influence at the forefront of this movement.7 Following closely on its heels, Anglo-​ Saxon critical theory produced the “rhetoric of inquiry” in the so-​called Iowa school,8 as well as the related researches of Wayne Booth.9 All are instances of a widespread turn back to rhetoric as a primary rather than only a derivative form of knowing.10 In all these cases, rhetoric—​which 6 The dependence of Descartes himself on medieval models and his transposition of Scholastic theology into the new frame of a modern phenomenological subject-​based philosophy was made manifest by Étienne Gilson, La liberté chez Descartes et la théologie (Paris: Vrin, 1982 [1913]). Jean-​Luc Marion builds on this foundation in numerous books on Descartes, particularly Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981)  and Sur le prisme métaphysique de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986). These works, among others, help bring to light modernity’s submerged theological presuppositions. 7 Key essays include Gérard Genette, “La rhétorique des figures,” Introduction to Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), 5–​17; Roland Barthes, “L’ancienne rhétorique—​ Aide mémoire,” Communications 16 (1970): 172–​ 229; Tzvetan Todorov, Littérature et signification (Paris: Larousse, 1967). 8 Brian Vickers, Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) and Brian Vickers, ed., Rhetoric Revalued (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1982); see, further, Herbert W. Simons, ed., The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 9 Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 10  The historical significance of this rhetorical turn is sifted by James L. Kastley, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); it is applied to modal logics by Nancy S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

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Orientation to Philosophical Logics  23 highlights and exploits the self-​reflexivity of language—​is considered not just as ornamental, but as essential, to the structure and substance of thinking and argument.11 This has been demonstrated in detail especially with respect to metaphor.12 Rhetoric turns out to be indispensable to disclosing meaning and even to revealing truth. In historical perspective, these movements can be considered as a latter-​ day renaissance of the rhetorically based humanism of the Renaissance, of which Dante is a premier representative. Dante is placed into this background of linguistic humanism (Sprachhumanismus) and is even made to stand out as an origin for it by Karl-​Otto Apel.13 Against this backdrop, Dante’s thought shows up as seminal for the whole development of critical theory down to the present day with, notably, Jürgen Habermas.14 Apel’s book (The Idea of Language in the Tradition of Humanism from Dante to Vico) is a reminder of all that this crucial tradition of modern and contemporary thought owes to ideas that find one of their most original expressions in Dante. Ernesto Grassi’s work in reconstructing this tradition and its relevance for modern philosophy and contemporary religious thought similarly sets Dante’s groundbreaking role into relief.15 As is most evident in a long historical perspective, these movements run curiously parallel to theological traditions of thinking self-​reflexively in and through the word. One such line can be traced from the Kabbalah through religiously philosophical thinkers like Franz Rosenzweig, with his “new thinking,” which he characterized as a “speaking thinking” (“das sprechende Denken”), as opposed to the “thinking thinking” (“das denkende Denken”) typical of modern philosophy.16 Although he was not usually sympathetic with the Kabbalah, Emmanuel Levinas extended a line of thinking that takes language, or more exactly Saying (le Dire), 11 Many different approaches through discourse theory and deconstruction, metanar­ ratology and metafiction, systems analysis and sociology are surveyed in the introduction to Florian Lippert and Marcel Schmid, eds., Self-​Reflection in Literature (Leiden: Brill/​Rodopi, 2020),  1–​19. 12  Recognition of metaphor as the basis and substance of thought extends even to the cognitive sciences with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). A connection with Vico is made by Marcel Danesi, Lingua, metafora, concetto. Vico e la linguistica cognitiva (Bari: Edizioni dal Sud, 2001); in English, see Danesi, Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 13  Karl-​Otto Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico (Bonn: Bouvier, 1963). 14 Eduardo Mendieta, The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-​Otto Apel’s Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (New  York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 37–​72, traces this genealogy. 15  A condensed epitome is Grassi’s “The Claim of the Word and the Religious Significance of Poetry: A Humanistic Problem,” Dionysius 8 (1984): 131–​55. 16  Franz Rosenzweig, “Das Neue Denken. Einige nachträgliche Bemerkungen zum ‘Stern der Erlösung,’ ” in Gesammelte Schriften III (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1984), translated in Franz Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking,” ed. Alan Udoff and Barbara E.  Galli (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998).

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24 Introduction as a primary manner of relating to reality.17 He shares this fundamental insight into the linguistic constitution of the real with phenomenological philosophers like Maurice Merleau-​Ponty and with critical thinkers like Walter Benjamin.18 This linguistic grounding of the real forms the most basic and general background for the specific speculative elaboration of self-​reflection that the present work purposes to lay out in certain of its revolutionary, modern emergences starting from Dante—​and also from Duns. The self-​reflective thinking of the divine Word with Duns Scotus furnishes the enabling charter for the new metaphysics that engenders modern science. The same radical embrace of reflexivity leads to Dante’s new thinking of revelation in poetic language. Throughout Book III of his Convivio, and most pointedly in Book IV, Chapter ii, Dante theorizes philosophy as essentially a form of contemplative self-​reflection: “The philosophizing soul … contemplates its contemplation of itself and the beauty of that act, turning itself back on itself and falling in love with itself on account of the beauty of that first gazing” (“l’anima filosofante … contempla lo suo contemplare medesimo e la bellezza di quello, rivolgendosi sovra se stessa e di se stessa innamorando per la bellezza del suo primo guardare,” IV.ii.18). Dante’s poetry in the Paradiso embodies this classic notion of self-​reflection and turns it in the direction of the revolution of modern consciousness in ways anticipating our most innovative thinking in both philosophy and rhetoric today.

17 Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-​delà de l’essence (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), trans. Alphonso Lingis as Otherwise than Being and Beyond Essence (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991). 18  An approach to constructing a tradition of thinking through the word that bridges from Kabbalistic theological sources to modern philosophy is proposed by Elliot R. Wolfson in Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).

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3  Self-​Reflexive Lyricism and Ineffability

Language, so understood as vital to the original disclosure of beings, shows up as theological revelation, the divine Word, in the light of Dante’s Christian faith. Dante explores language in the Paradiso as the revelation of the intrinsic structure of “being” and ultimately of “God.” He discovers language as a sort of a priori revelation of the divine Word that is incarnate in the matter or “flesh” of letters. Of course, strictly considered, the absolute simplicity of God’s being admits of no structure whatsoever. Indeed, the structure of language that Dante observes can only be the negation of God’s being. It works on the basis of the negative or “kenotic” (self-​emptying) logic of the Incarnation. That God’s infinite being could, after all, be reflected in finite being (the universe) and in a particular being, a human individual, namely, Jesus Christ (the Word, the perfect image of God), is a miracle for which no mere logic can adequately account—​unless it be something like the logic of the coincidentia oppositorum found in Eriugena and Eckhart and developed systematically by Nicholas of Cusa. “Cusanus” (as he is called by his contemporaries writing in Latin) applied such a logic in De docta ignorantia (1440) to God as “absolute maximum” (Book I) contracted into the universe (Book II) and into the individual Jesus Christ (Book III). In the tradition which I call “apophatic,” it is precisely the ineffability of God and the inability of language to express what is truly real, let alone the ultimate reality of God, that best expresses what is most essential about language. This inability indirectly reveals—​by obliquely alluding to—​its source in what can only be (un)conceived as a divine Abyss. Hence, “To thee silence is praise” (Psalm 65:2). Only silence does no dishonor to the divine. This is often observed in the broad medieval Scholastic tradition from Moses Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed I:59 to Meister Eckhart’s Commentary on Exodus (paragraph 174). Standing in the middle between them is Aquinas’s famous experience of vision inducing silence at the culmination of his life’s work, which appeared to him as mere “straw”1—​“paglia” as “Tommaso” echoes in Paradiso 1  “Omnia, quae scripsi, videntur mihi paleae respectu eorum, quae vidi et revelata sunt mihi.” Boll. Processus de vita S. Thomae Aquinatis IX, 79, 711. See, further, Bruno Forte, Il silenzio di Tommaso (Monferrato: Piemme, 1998).

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26 Introduction XIII.34. Curiously, in every case, the linguistic focus reverses itself into an attention to the beyond of language.2 Rhetorical and linguistic philosophy thought through to its limits becomes thought about the limits of language and its beyond, and this current, as just inventoried in section 2, offers some of the most pertinent paradigms for understanding Dante’s Paradiso. Semiological thinking, too, as developed by the likes of Charles Sanders Peirce and Umberto Eco, can illuminate language’s inexorable drive and destiny to probe the limits of its ability to conceptualize.3 Dante insists throughout his culminating poem on ineffability as the foundational motif of his discourse. The immediacy of song, the pure presence of a plenum, does not say anything. It turns out to be indistinguishable from silence—​as when the lark becomes silent in the contentment of the ultimate sweetness that satiates it (“tace contento /​de l’ultima dolcezza che la sazia,” Paradiso XX.74–​ 75; see section 8). Language must continually evade or negate all final determinations in order to remain infinite, and it is in silence that it realizes or returns to this state of indeterminacy, in which it most truly reflects divinity. Ineffability has come more and more into focus as the source and core of Dante’s poetic discourse in the Paradiso.4 Ineffability has long been linked, moreover, specifically with the lyricism of the Paradiso, for example, by Salvatore Battaglia: “The third cantica finds its initial lyric impetus in the very premise of the expressive insufficiency of the poet … This stylistic drama is perhaps the most lyrical component of the third cantica” (“La terza cantica trova la sua prima emozione lirica nella stessa premessa dell’insufficienza espressiva del poeta … Questo dramma stilistico è forse la componente più lirica della terza cantica”).5 It is especially the lyrical quality of language that assumes the burden of expressing what language cannot say—​what is in excess of its representational, discursive content. And this lyricism, consisting essentially in self-​reflexive relations, is grounded by Dante eminently in the intimate life of the divine Trinity.

2  On What Cannot Be Said, vol. 1, analyzes these cases and numerous others in just such terms. 3  This paradigm is worked out in its application to Dante by Raffaele De Benedictis, Wordly Wise: The Semiotics of Discourse in Dante’s Commedia (New York: Peter Lang, 2012). 4  The bibliography is daunting. As significant indications and instances of this critical trend, which is something of a groundswell, I would single out Marco Ariani, Lux inaccessibilis: Metafore e teologia della luce nel Paradiso di Dante (Rome: Aracne, 2010) and Giuseppe Ledda, La guerra della lingua: Ineffabilità, retorica e narrativa nella Commedia di Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 2002). I give more extensive bibliography on this subject in “Language and Transcendence in Dante’s Paradiso,” in The Poetics of Transcendence, ed. Elisa Heinämäki, P. M. Mehtonen, and Antti Salminen (Amsterdam: Rodopi: 2015), 107–​31. 5  Salvatore Battaglia, Esemplarità e antagonismo nel pensiero di Dante (Naples: Liguori, 1975),  44–​45.

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Self-Reflexive Lyricism and Ineffability  27 In what follows, I aim to sift the lyricism of the Paradiso by analyzing it as consisting essentially in self-​reflexivity. I will suggest how this self-​ reflexivity becomes a primary mode of theological revelation in the poem. This will require critical readings of key passages of the poem, but also philosophical reflection engaged with Dante’s text in an original thinking that endeavors not to explain exactly what Dante thought and meant so much as to exploit the unique perspective his work affords for realizing the full meaning of our own intellectual predicament. By apprehending our own ideas in their emergence from their historical matrices, this reflection will show how we are Dante’s heirs even more than we can fully (and reflectively) realize. Thus my further aim is to reveal the role of self-​reflection in constituting our own inescapably modern manner of thinking and to sound our indebtedness in such thinking to modes of reflection that are poetically invented and superlatively performed in the text of Dante’s Paradiso. One caveat: the book makes no attempt to provide a comprehensive reading of the Paradiso but rather takes the lyricism of the Paradiso as profoundly revelatory of modern self-​reflection. Ultimately, this will lead to recognition of possibilities for reopening the sealed and occulted theological horizons of modern thinking. It will expose certain theological underpinnings still inhering in even our most thoroughly secularized intellectual assumptions. This way of reading Dante relates closely to the emerging movement in Dante studies forged by scholars, especially in Britain and the United States, working under the banner of “Dante and Theology” from their diversely radical or traditional perspectives. The 2013 encounter in Jerusalem mentioned in the Acknowledgments is one milestone that serves for orientation in this landscape. My 1996 book Dante’s Interpretive Journey was already moving in this direction. Theology is much more than a specialized science or doctrine: it pervades Dante’s entire intellection of the real. His poetico-​theological framing of all of knowledge furnishes a model for humanities studies considered broadly, even universally, that is worthy of our emulation still today. Paradoxically, this humanistic, self-​reflective framing hails from a theology of transcendence. Rendering this paradox intelligible is central to the task of this book.

Self-​Reflexivity as an Eminent Way of Theological Transcendence By a sort of structural necessity, language is always about itself, whatever else it may allude to or reference. Language achieves intelligibility only by virtue of a certain return to itself. Its elements must be discernible as differentiated from other sounds or sensations in the environing acoustic or graphic continuum. In its return upon itself language is thrown into relief in its being as language.

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28 Introduction This inescapable self-​reflexivity of language is grounded in (and perhaps grounds) the structure of Being itself. This means that it is grounded, furthermore, in the prime instance of being, namely, divinity, God—​ insofar as such “things” can be thought or conceived at all. Historically, these purportedly ineluctable principles or “truths” concerning both language and ontology, at least as they have been conceived in Western culture from Aristotle to Émile Benveniste, are embedded and reflected in theological doctrines. Particularly the doctrine of the Trinity, which is constituted by relations of self-​reflection, and the conception of God as the Word (Logos) which was in the beginning with God and which was God (Gospel of John 1:1), illuminate the nature of language in its self-​ reflective, creative capacity of self-​engenderment and worldly incarnation. Philosophically, these doctrines are given perhaps their fullest, most systematic exposition by G.  W. F.  Hegel. Hegel’s Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik, 1812–​16) is a matchlessly penetrating treatise on self-​reflection (“Selbstreflexion”) as the underlying metaphysical principle of all Being in its dynamic unfolding in history. But long before this explicit, systematic theorization, Dante poetically intuits self-​reflexivity in language as the engine driving history and rendering thought intelligible. Linguistically realized self-​reflexivity is the principle that holds together the exposition of reality throughout the universe—​insofar as the real can be reflected in and by language at all. Dante, moreover, is sensitive to the specifically linguistic aspects of self-​reflection that Hegel sometimes seems to cover over in his overriding concern for scientificity and for conceptual thinking as absolute and therefore, presumably, independent of its encultured linguistic medium.6 Dante’s persistently autobiographical reflection already saturates his first book, the Vita nuova, and it only becomes more pervasive and comprehensive all the way through to the end of his oeuvre. His relentless self-​ profiling is the most macroscopic mark of his revolutionary significance in inaugurating a new era of self-​reflection. A  self-​conscious, self-​reflective individual stands forth compellingly in Dante’s work as never before. This gained him recognition as the first modern European by the likes of Jakob Burkhardt in his landmark history of the Italian Renaissance.7 We can see this reflective self-​consciousness developing in 6  Much has been done recently by scholars such as Pierre-​Jean Labarrière, Pierre Macharay, and others to nuance this commonplace by underlining the key role of language in Hegel’s conceptual thinking. Bruno Liebrucks’s Sprache und Bewußtsein (Frankfurt am Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1964–​79) translates Hegel’s philosophy of the Absolute into terms conversant with contemporary language philosophy. The topic is focused by Jim Vernon, Hegel’s Philosophy of Language (London: Continuum, 2007) and is variously analyzed in Jere O’Neill Surber, ed., Hegel and Language (New  York: SUNY Press, 2006). 7  Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, 2  vols. (New  York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), I.151. Originally Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860). More recently, Marco

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Self-Reflexive Lyricism and Ineffability  29 Dante’s early works, and we will take stock of them along the way. But to go straight to the heart of the matter, we begin in Part I with some detailed analysis of the Paradiso.

Language of the Other as Reflection of Trinitarian and Incarnational Theology Especially in the Paradiso, Dante creates a poetic language that makes vividly and palpably manifest the necessary self-​involution of language, its self-​reflexive thematizing of its own nature as language. However, this involution is geared precisely to being able to make the gesture of pointing beyond itself and opening toward an Other, someone absolutely other to all that can be articulated. Interpreted theologically, this means the nameless and unsignifiable: “God.” Even the gesture of subverting conventional referential or objective signification is still a roundabout and negative manner of signifying: it turns signification toward the infinite and (for us) indeterminate. What is not as such signified, and yet lies at the base of the activity and of the very possibility of signifying, can be interpreted theologically. It can also be interpreted simply as “non-​ duality” by further negating even this theological language and its rhetoric of otherness. Dante obsessively performs just such self-​ reflexive interpretation opening upon theological transcendence. The contemplative San Pier Damiani, for example, speaks of the divine light above him that, conjoined with his gaze, lifts him above himself so far that he sees the highest essence, God:   Luce divina sopra me s’appunta,   penetrando per questa in ch’io m’inventro la cui virtù, col mio veder congiunta,   mi leva sopra me tanto, ch’i’ veggio   la somma essenza de la quale è munta.

      (Paradiso XXI.83–​87)

  (The divine light brings itself to a point above me,   penetrating into this light in which I am enwombed, whose virtue, conjoined with my seeing,   raises me above myself so much that I see   the highest essence from which it is milked.)

Santagata, L’io e il mondo: Un’interpretazione di Dante (Milan: Il Mulino, 2011), recognizes in Dante’s attitude of “autoriflessione” (53) the characteristic profile of the modern intellectual. This burgeoning branch of research is overviewed in the Forum “Dante and Biography” coordinated by Elisa Brilli in Dante Studies 136 (2018): 133–​231.

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30 Introduction The structure of correspondence, and even of mutual entailment, between self-​ enclosure (“io m’inventro”) and elevation beyond and above the self (“mi leva sopra me”) to a transcendent divinity (“la somma sapienza”), which in turn acts reflexively, is embodied in the reflexive verb “s’appunta.” This neologism renders verbal and reflexive the image of the “point” (“punto”)—​as which Dante sees God in the penultimate and ultimate heavens (XXVIII.16; XXIX.9; XXX.11; XXXIII.94). Such a self-​reflexive/​self-​transcending structure is clearly indicated here and in many other places throughout the Paradiso. Paradoxically, the way beyond the self passes through a reflexive turning back upon the self. That is the pattern of self-​reflection that miraculously turns language—​at least as it is exhibited in Dante’s Paradiso—​into theological revelation. And herein lies the real argument of this book. Crucial for understanding the apotheosis of lyric in the Paradiso is the realization that its lyrical self-​ reflectiveness is at the same time a reflection of theological transcendence. The poem reflects a transcendent order of being, as well as a personal divinity who is present as an ineffable “Other”—​other to any possible language—​in the reflection performed by lyrical language. It is paradoxical that the self-​enclosure of lyrical language, which doubles back on itself—​words calling attention to themselves as words and even as mere sounds—​should create an opening toward the transcendent Other and specifically toward a language-transcendent divine Person. Yet that is exactly what we have to imagine in order to understand the significance of lyrical language at its most inspired and far-​reaching. Language achieves transcendence by collapsing into the radical immanence of sound, which says nothing, and eventually yields to silence. In some sense, the most important destination of lyric in all ages is silence, the ultimate “other” of every sound and speech. How many lyric poets, from Leopardi to Giorgio Caproni, or from Hölderlin to Rilke and Celan, not to mention Rimbaud and Mallarmé, or Emily Dickinson, pursuing their projects to their furthest limits, have demonstrated this! Witness T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets turning on “the still point of the turning world.” And witness the hecatombs of books and courses consecrated to the poetics and aesthetics of silence. Silence, in varying degrees, is apt to become the essential destination of lyric in most any age. Silence marks the ineluctable limit to expression of a poetics of transcendence such as Dante’s. Transcendence—​the soul’s elevation to God—​through self-​reflexivity is the basic project and the driving force behind the lyric as Dante discloses it. This project’s reflection of the Transcendent is achieved in two ways corresponding respectively to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The Paradiso enacts at once a trinitarian-​reflexive and a sacramental-​incarnational poetics of the lyric. The two fit together in the way that “our effigy” (“la nostra effige”) is inscribed within “That circling which conceives itself” (“Quella circolazion che si concetta”). They unite as the “reflected light” (“lume reflesso”) fits into the compenetrating three circles (“tre giri”) at the end of the Paradiso (XXXIII.115–​32).

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Self-Reflexive Lyricism and Ineffability  31 The poetic verse or “versus,” in its etymological sense, is a turning. In lyric verse, this turning clearly entails a turning back upon itself and thereby a foregrounding of its own being as language. Yet it is also, at the same time, a turning toward transcendence at its own (empty) center. All language, and most conspicuously lyrical language, tends to turn upon itself, which is why tropes—​literally “turnings”—​are so peculiarly at home in the lyric and, in fact, make up its very substance rather than being only adventitious embellishments. But when the signifier turns toward itself, it is no longer simply itself as a determinate quantity. It has transcended itself toward its own universality, its being as language, the Logos. In this self-​reflexivity, lyric language resembles or mirrors the Supreme Being, the paradigm of all being—​the Trinity. It models reflexive attachment to and even love of itself. And this turning upon itself is what makes its sense sensuous, incarnate. The sounds and shapes of language, the signifiers in which it manifestly consists, draw attention to themselves as signifiers in all their material concreteness. Lyric self-​reflexivity renders thought sensuous, the idea material, the Logos incarnate. This is to take language as a phenomenon that, in itself, reveals Being. In biblical terms, words are understood to be made and to operate in the image of the divine Word. This is the faith of poets belonging to a certain lyric tradition in which poetry becomes practically a religion.8 But it finds its most powerful and seminal expression in Dante’s Paradiso. This is the faith that language reveals the essences of things and that it does so in itself, and not just as an instrument or as a transparent medium serving simply to refer to something else beyond itself. Language not only reveals the essences of beings: it also gives us our only means of understanding Being, including Trinitarian, divine Being in its inherent self-​reflexivity. Language’s sensuous rendering of meaning or spirit simultaneously illuminates the divine Word’s incarnateness. In fact, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation themselves may be understood—​and were often understood in Patristic tradition, for example, by Augustine—​on the basis of analogy with language in its intrinsic self-​reflexiveness and sensuous ideality. The doctrine of the Trinity is interlocked with that of the Incarnation in the final images of the Paradiso and also in numerous ad hoc descriptions such as: Lì si cantò non Bacco, non Peana,   ma tre persone in divina natura,   ed in una persona essa e l’umana.

      (XIII.25–​ 27)

8  Such a confluence of medieval metaphysics with modern poetics is expounded theologically by Olivier-​Thomas Venard, moving from Thomas Aquinas to Arthur Rimbaud, in Littérature et théologie: Une saison en enfer (Geneva: Ad Solem, 2002).

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32 Introduction There one sings of neither Bacchus nor Paean   but of three persons in divine nature   and in one person the divine and the human. Bringing divine self-​ relatedness together with incarnation of spirit in matter and history is one of the momentous, world-​historical achievements of the Christian religion, and Dante’s work repeats it in terms of his own medieval culture. Acute realization of lyric plenitude and of the abyss of Godhead are both necessary to him for this purpose.

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PART I

The Paradiso’s Theology of Language and its Lyric Origins Out of the Abyss

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4  The 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

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36 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language 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

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The Self-Reflexive Trinitarian Structure  37 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

1  Eugene 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.

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38 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language 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. 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. 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.

2  Michael Martin, The Incarnation of the Poetic Word: Theological Essays on Poetry & Philosophy (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2017)  explores modern continuations in this key. 3 My “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.

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The Self-Reflexive Trinitarian Structure  39

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 within the Godhead. This is already inherent implicitly in the fact that the Son is another person and, as such, “hypostatically” distinct from the Father. This fact opens up an internal gap or articulation within the bosom of the Trinity. All unity and concord between them notwithstanding, the distinction between the persons of the Trinity is insuperable. Still more insuperable, however, than any representations of their differences is the difference between representations and the unrepresentable. God’s being cannot be grasped directly as the perfect oneness and simplicity of Godhead but only through recognition of God’s absolute difference from anything that can be representated. The positive perfections of divinity such as being, goodness, oneness, beauty, and truth (the “transcendentals”) recede from apparent intelligibility to the status of unrepresentable mysteries. From this point on, it is most profoundly the abyss of the Father that is reflected in the Son. In some sense, at the deepest level, what the Son reveals of God is just this abyss of the Godhead. This is pushed in certain Christian (radical Protestant and especially Gnostic) theologies to the limit of insisting that the Father is revealed only in the Son. From this perspective, without the Son, God would not be revealed as Father, or perhaps even at all: “He” would remain unknowable in his sheer transcendence of everything finite and worldly. Only in his self-​reflection (in the Son or the Creation) does the original Being of God (symbolized as the Father) becomes manifest. What God’s Being is before or apart from the act of self-​reflection that engenders the Son remains an unrelatable mystery—​without face or name. The phrase that Dante uses for the Father as the source or root of Godhead is “ineffabile valore”—​an ineffable value or even “valence”—​or, in other words, a kind of empty placeholder for whatever we must value most highly. The abyss of Godhead that is manifest only through self-​reflection forces Dante to resort to a poetics of ineffability. Metaphors aside, there is no language for God but, instead, the failure of language to attain finally to the infinitely other. Through this very failure, Dante endeavors to apprehend—​or rather to indicate or hint at—​divinity. Accordingly, Godhead cannot be apprehended directly in itself, but only analogically—​ as reflected in the self-​reflections of the universe and of language itself. That the universe itself is created ex nihilo perfectly mirrors this Nothing

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40 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language which is all that we can discern of the divine nature at the origin of the Godhead. Modeled on this Trinitarian theological paradigm, the paradox of self-​reflection is that the self becomes an identifiable self, a positively perceived and thinkable being, only in and through such reflection. Reflection is absolutely necessary for it to be manifest at all. There is no self to speak of before such self-​reflection: there is only what cannot be apprehended except as an empty abyss. The apprehension of a substantial self thus arises from reflection rather than preceding it as its condition. Like the Trinity, the self is through and through relational. Self-​reflection, accordingly, rather than being simple, straightforward self-​iteration of something positively given, exposes the lack of a freestanding, positive, substantial presence of the self simply in and for itself. Filling this emptiness is nothing but the faith that what in itself can be apprehended only as Nothing is nevertheless the source of all being and experience. This is so whether this Nothing is taken as standing for the inner essence of subjectivity or as the abyss of divinity. In either case, only self-​projection through a kind of “faith” makes self-​reflection a revelation rather than just a show of empty Nothing, an exposure of vanity. After the fall of language and its dispersion into multiplicity at Babel (Genesis 11:1–​9), this self-​reflexive structure of language is no longer always or automatically a revelation or an index of divine origins. In a fallen world, in which we see “through a glass darkly,” self-​reflexive language can even become a vice—​the vice of mere empty rhetoric that shows itself off at the expense of any more substantial content. It is, in other words, a condition of linguistic narcissism. Nonetheless, this structure of self-​reflexiveness is indispensable to the wholeness and perfection of language. Self-​reflexiveness is the structure through which language mirrors the very being of God as Trinitarian self-​ relation and so instantiates truth and reflects and imitates Being as such. Without this relation of self-​reflexivity, language is reduced from its vocation of revealing Being to merely serving human beings as a tool for their communications and for representing their thoughts and intentions. It no longer serves for reflecting the divine Essence. Only through its intrinsic self-​reflexive dynamic is language able to surpass the human manipulation of linguistic signs for merely human purposes. Dante’s poetic, and particularly his lyrical, language constitutes a concentrated effort to restore language to its original state of perfect self-​ reflexivity. His language in the Paradiso aspires to become the image or imitation of a free and autonomous, self-​contemplating, self-​engendering, self-​loving God. To become this, it must emulate the divine Word—​the perfect self-​reflection of the Father. This perfect self-​reflexivity proclaims a miraculous revelation of divine Being. At the same time, however, the self-​reflection that is a reflection of divine transcendence is also a reference to what cannot be apprehended or described. Self-​reflexivity in this form is a mode of relating to an ungraspable (un)Ground (ungrunt,

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The Self-Reflexive Trinitarian Structure  41 as Jakob Böhme would later baptize it) that withdraws from language and knowledge. In self-​reflection, so understood, the “self” is radically transcended. This can be seen best with relation to the language of lyric. Its self-​reflexive intensity is produced by purely formal play with language itself. It is produced and suspended from Nothing—​at least from no independently ascertainable object outside itself. Yet precisely this self-​reflexive dynamic, hinging from Nothing, proves to be highly, indeed infinitely, productive of the phenomena of the Creation and of language alike. The Void, as we shall see, can be fathomed only through self-​ reflection. And self-​reflection achieves completion only by recognizing itself as pivoting from what, for representation, is a Void. At stake in reflection into the Void is the freeing of form from delimitation by determinate content. That form has, or is, its own kind of content—​one that can be reflected into itself—​becomes paramount at certain junctures and moments of crisis in cultural history—​notably with Hegel.4 But it becomes visible already in Dante’s time with Duns Scotus and his taking up of Avicenna’s teaching concerning essences (essentia) as having a certain formal independence of the real existence (esse) of beings.5 It is pursued in our own day by reflection along the lines of hermeneutical theory speculating on the kind of content that is intrinsic to form as such.6 We will examine (and the Epilogue will illustrate) how the autonomous life of form becomes a crucial axis of Dante’s lyric experience of Paradise.

4  Catherine Malabou brings out this immanent dynamic of speculative reflexivity in L’avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (Paris: Vrin, 1996), trans. Lisabeth During as The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (London: Routledge, 2005). 5 See Part II, sections 20–​34. 6 Hadyn White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

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5  Beyond Representation—​Origins of Lyric Reflection in Nothing

Lyric is language enamored of itself as language. Lyric epitomizes the “poetic function” of language, in which the signifier calls attention to itself as signifier rather than directing attention to something else beyond itself, something that it means, namely, “the signified.” Linguistic structures of self-​reflection and self-​enclosure become dominant in lyric, which thereby becomes a self-​positing or self-​manifesting—​and even a sort of absolutizing—​of language. Language becomes an end in itself or a showing of itself more than a means to refer to an external domain of objects. Put crudely, pure lyric represents an absolute degree of linguistic self-​ reference, where representationality disappears and the signifier’s meaning is absorbed into its immediate physical presence as sound. Language becomes, in some sense, music. It can embody and be its meaning rather than only abstractly signifying it. This does not preclude its still relating to the world—​but the world as internal to itself and as originating in and from language. What is surpassed is only language’s relating to the world as purely external to it. Language can become, instead, a world of its own—​or, more exactly, a mode of access to what can only subsequently be apprehended as world. The idea of music as absolute expression or signification was to be developed concertedly in the Romantic era by Arthur Schopenhauer and then often with reference to Richard Wagner. Nietzsche recognizes music as originary expression exceeding meaning and rupturing representation in The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872). Still sifting the peculiar hyper-​significance of music and resorting to an explicitly theological vocabulary likely suggested by the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno’s criticism presents music as being meaningful like language, yet without ever achieving determinate meaning. It is rather a meaningless form, like a proper name, but one that expresses the whole—​in effect, the Name of God.1 1 Theodor W.  Adorno, “Fragment über Musik und Sprache,” in Quasi una fantasia in Musikalische Schriften I-​ III, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 16 (Frankfurt am Main:

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Origins of Lyric Reflection in Nothing  43 In lyric, so understood, language, like love, tends to become no longer a form of mediation of a separate object so much as an absolute presence existing in its own right. Love, too, in the lyric takes a self-​reflective turn. The lyric “I” turns out to be in love simply with its own being in love, and the lyric love poem consists most essentially of love of the poem itself. In lyric, on this account, language is enamored of nothing but language itself. Love and language alike become intransitive, objectless forces. They are supposed, instead, to express an outpouring of immediate feeling, the immediacy of “inspiration.” Love emerges as an unconditional act of the subject, just as language in lyric becomes a direct, unmediated embodiment of subjective affects of joy or pain.

Troubadour Origins of Lyric Self-​Transcendence in Nothing Objectlessness is a preeminent condition of modern secular lyric experience right from its inception with “Farai un vers de dreyt nien” (“I will make a vers of exactly nothing”) by Guilhem de Peitieus (1071–​1127), seventh count of Poitiers, ninth duke of Aquitaine, and “first” of the Troubadours. This inaugural poem of the vernacular lyric discloses from the outset the nothingness of the putative object of the lyric and of courtly desire. In this Troubadour’s oeuvre, the intention of the courtly word is already revealed as nothing outside of or apart from itself. In declaring “I will make a vers of exactly nothing” programmatically at the opening of the fourth of his eleven extant “vers” or poems, Guilhem (in Provençal), or Guillaume (in modern French), or simply “William,” negates all the positive content his song might have qua objective communication. But in so doing, he assumes an expressive posture, and he enacts a structure of language and subjectivity that effectively annihilates—​rather than positing—​any object: non er de mi ni d’autra gen, non er d’amor ni de joven, ni de ren au …2 (there’ll be nothing in it about me or anyone else, nothing about love or youth or anything else …) Virtually the same blanket negation as in the first verse, then, is repeated again verbatim with variations in the envoy at the end of the poem—​“Fag Suhrkamp, 1978), 252–​ 56, trans. Rodney Livingstone as “Music and Language: A Fragment,” in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (London and New  York: Verso, 1992), 1–​6. 2  Text and translation from Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History, trans. Frederick Goldin (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/​Doubleday, 1973), 24.

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44 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language ai lo vers, no say de cui” (“I have made this vers, I don’t know what it’s about”). This poem stands emblematically as the opening composition in the selection of the classic Troubadour anthology Le Parnasse Occitanien, ou Choix des Poésies Originales des Troubadours published in 1819 in Toulouse (Benichet Cadet). In this position, it becomes recognizable as the very first poem of the Troubadour tradition. With its shift away from objective referentiality, declared outright, it stands as a manifesto poem for vernacular lyric. It is taken up in numerous references by other Troubadours, including Raimbaut of Orange in his famous “Escotatz mas no say que s’es” (“Listen, I don’t know what this is”). Other echoes are found in Marcabru, Biraut de Bornelh, Bernart de Ventadorn.3 Near the culmination of Troubadour literature, and building on these precedents, especially on William’s dreit nien, the “tenson du néant” (tenzo on nothingness) (circa 1230)  between Aimeric de Peguilhan and Albertet de Sisteron reflects explicitly on the ontological void at the source of the poem and of the love it sings.4 According to Roger Dragonetti, such a poem about nothing “forms a web of pure signs practically without relation to the exterior world” (“Un tel poème formerait alors un réseau de signes purs, sans rapport, ou presque, avec le monde extérieur”).5 The poem articulates “a desire without object, desire of love completely taken with itself” (“un désir sans objet, désir d’amour épris de lui-​même,” 190)—​or, in other words, a perfectly narcissistic desire. Dragonetti analyzes this tendency as Guillaume’s attempt to reconcile spiritual and sensual love. They were deemed irreconcilable by the Platonism of the twelfth century as expressed eminently by three great Bernards: Bernard Sylvestris, of the school of Chartres; Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian order; and Bernard of Morlaix, a monk of Cluny and author of De contemptu mundi. All arguably rejected sexuality as fallen, and all embraced some form of an aspiration of the redeemed soul to return to a virgin or angelic state. However, when both spiritual and sensual desire alike are revealed as most deeply and truly without object, the two no longer contradict each other. Instead of moving toward incompatible ends, sensuality and spirituality enter into

3  Lynne Lawner, “Tot es niens,” Cultura Neolatina 31 (1971): 155-​70, places the poem in the context of metaphysics and dialectical culture of the turn from the eleventh to the twelfth century. 4  For text and analysis, see Jacques Roubad, La fleur inverse: L’art des Troubadours, 2nd ed. (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2009), 23-​53, who explicitly evokes negative theology as a matrix. This background is evaluated by Michel Stanesco, “L’expérience poétique du ‘pur néant’ chez Guillaume II d’Aquitaine,” Médiévales 6 (1984):  48-​68. 5 Roger Dragonetti, “Aux origines de l’amour courtois: La poétique amoureuse de Guillaume IX d’Aquitaine,” in La musique et les lettres (Geneva: Droz, 1986), 169–​200.

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Origins of Lyric Reflection in Nothing  45 dynamic tension. They become complementary forms of undoing themselves and their finite limitations: each is broken open by the other to the infinite. Intuitively reaching in this direction, William IX initiates a poetry of formal play (conjured out of nothing) and simulation that is based on repetition. In its lustful playfulness, its scandalous uproariousness as a jeu d’esprit, this poetry is purely “spirituelle” (witty) and has no representational pretenses staking a claim to portray things as they really are, or even just to represent a possible or fictive world. This poetry, strictly speaking, is about nothing. As such, this poetry stands as an immediate inscription of affect, of the joie de chanter—​the joy of singing itself. William’s boisterous, irreverent, impertinent, often obscene manner, as well as its inversion—​his remorseful, repentant, supplicant manner (as in “Pos de chanter m’es pres talenz”)—​can both be read as further ways of supporting and executing his dissolution of all into nothing. Both are key to producing his characteristically courtly poetic act consisting in a word whose immediate intention is primarily itself. This is achieved through the erasing or effacing of any referential object. This essential absence of the object of courtly love is also effectively monumentalized by Jaufré Rudel’s “amor de lonh” (“love from afar”)—​another landmark shaping and displacing the landscape of the Troubadour tradition as a whole.6 With the absence of an external referent, the object of love becomes more patently the chant itself. Joy is concentrated in the very incantation of the verse. Jouissance, which can be strongly sexual in connotation, is achieved internally to the lyric and its ecstasy as self-​engendered. This is joie de chanter, the joy of singing, and the lyric is its immediate inscription. Such jouissance is self-​engendering, but it is also a gift from beyond. Especially this latter aspect finds an irresistible emblem in the skylark and its heavenward ascent, an image with which the inspired poet strongly identifies. This image can be traced from Bernart de Ventadorn (“Can vei la lauzeta mover”) to Dante himself (“Quale alodetta che ’n aere si spazia,” Paradiso XX.73), and it has a long afterlife subsequent to him. We find it singing still, for example, in Romantic poet John Clare’s “The Skylark” and in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lyric “To a Skylark.” This progeny will be pursued further in section 8, once the Troubadour origins of lyric self-​reflexivity and its theological troping by Dante have been established as frame. These self-​reflective leanings of the vernacular lyric were to be developed to their limit by Dante in the Paradiso, where they are expressly directed to the divine. However, the emphasis on form for its own sake is not to be taken unilaterally. That is only one direction in which this sort of lyric asks to be read. It does not, after all, exclude equally important readings 6 Leo Spitzer, L’amour lointain de Jaufré Rudel et le sens de la poésie des troubadours (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

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46 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language based on presumable—​usually negated—​referential contents and their ideological underpinnings and social implications. The poem, taken as an autotelic emanating nucleus of affect voiding reference beyond itself, cannot be understood, in the end, except in terms of its own historical context.7 To this end, Rainer Warning deftly discusses the public conditions of possibility of the lyric “I.”8 The purely formal aspect of this poetry tends to suspend and dispel, or at least to sublate and transfigure, this more concrete material-​historical referentiality. However, it cannot succeed completely or finally in this evacuation. In fact, the voiding of referentiality first becomes fully significant only in connection with the writer’s historical position and situation.

Social Dimension and Sitz-​im-​Leben of Troubadour Lyric Troubadour songs certainly existed and circulated in oral form a long time prior to William’s compositions. The genuine historical-​literary significance of William IX as the “first” of the Troubadours can only be that he was first to write down his vernacular texts.9 William inaugurates Troubadour poetry in the sense of being the first to have committed such compositions to writing so that they are still extant. Furthermore, and momentously, it is just this written form that first frees the lyric to pursue, untrammeled, its aspiration toward transcendence of all social contexts—​and eventually even of all semantic contents. Frederick Goldin describes the original limitations of the courtly lyric hemmed in by a concrete performance situation and, therefore, not yet free to explore language for its own intrinsic possibilities and powers, reaching beyond its social uses toward religious transcendence and experience of an absolute or spiritual self. The situation was what effectively prevented this poetry from speaking to the human longing for transcendence; and, except for versification, it kept poetic resources in a state of poverty. The language had to be appropriate for a performance, and the experience of love could not be explored beyond the point where it ceased to have a communal significance. Figurative language was frozen stiff: it had to stay strictly representational, it could not make many associations outside the facts of courtly life—​the heavens themselves were

7  Eva Müller-​Zettelmann, “ ‘A Frenzied Oscillation’; Auto-​Reflexivity in the Lyric,” in Eva Müller-​Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik, eds., Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 125–​46. 8 Rainer Warning, “Lyrisches Ich und Öffentlichkeit bei den Trobadors,” in Christoph Cormeau, ed., Deutsche Literatur im Mittelalter—​Kontakte und Perspektiven. Hugo Kuhn zum Gedenken (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979), 120–​59. 9 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “The Transgression(s) of the First Troubadour,” Stanford French Review 14 (1990): 117–​41.

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Origins of Lyric Reflection in Nothing  47 framed by the windows of the court. Thus the basic poetic means of exploring experience, namely, the exploration of language, was practically unavailable. The moment poets sought to create a lyric that would not require the perspectives of an audience, that would be free to examine the consequences of its own figures of speech—​that is the moment when the troubadour tradition changed forever.10 Goldin concludes concerning the Troubadours and their experience of love that “no mortal fact, like time and circumstance” could delimit it (123) but that the writing of poetry was necessary as the means of its liberation from external, social constraints so as to deliver it into this unlimited, speculative dimension. The Troubadours broke down social and stylistic barriers by combining highly refined culture with popular poetry in the “natural” language of the vernacular. They hybridized high-​church liturgy, which had chanted and hymned divine love throughout the preceding centuries, with profane songs of court jesters and street entertainers. They lent to the highest and most ethereal artistic ambitions, and to the most noble and refined sentiments of love, strikingly original expression as thoroughly worldly. Dialogued tensos and partimens are the remote ancestors of call-​and-​response rap and hip-​hop today: such performance art has its roots in medieval jousts.11 Something of the Troubadours and their art of liberation at all levels still lives in American folk song as represented by poet-​musicians such as Bob Dylan. The thirteenth-​century Occitanian verse romance Flamenca incarnates sexual liberation and even the gender equality of women, thereby bringing certain covert implications of Troubadour culture out into the open.12 Yet this liberation does not exhaust the Troubadours significance for modernity: their indelible legacy is bound up also with a sublimation directed toward a higher level of existence beyond any objective, external, social world. Even while still allowing for and incorporating into his poetry the circumstances of performance, William, among his most stupendous innovations, nevertheless, inaugurates the existence of love in lyric in the form of a written text. It is this textual nesting that opens the possibility for lyric to take wing without deflating its aspirations to transcendence by dissolving them into the immanent exigencies of the poem’s function in performance situations. Literariness, as it begins to take shape in the fledgling corpus of William’s poems, thus becomes a dimension opening to infinity. As a written work, the poem can become a vehicle of metaphysical speculation or mystical love. It is no longer limited as a pragmatically circumstanced communication subservient to mundane exigences. The 10 Goldin, Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères, 122. 11  Pierre Bec, La joute poétique. De la tenson médiévale aux débats chantés traditionnels (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2000). 12  See René Nelli, L’érotique des troubadours (Toulouse: Privat, 1963).

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48 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language written text can mediate these extraliterary factors as conditions immanent to itself rather than simply being conditioned by them from the outside as constraints circumscribing the possibilities of its self-​expression. William’s provocation of putting song into written form in this way usurps upon clerical privileges, for clerics had previously possessed a virtual monopoly on employment of the techniques of writing for all higher cultural purposes—​all those with permanent significance beyond merely pragmatic motives such as accounting and inventorying. The word “clerk” itself serves as an etymological reminder that writing was reserved for the clergy or “clerics.” William’s revolutionary gesture constitutes a sally unseating ecclesiastical authority by showing how, in the case of the lyric, even thoroughly secular writing can acquire the means of taking on universal and speculative significance. This would eventually include the theological type of significance that becomes fully manifest in the Paradiso. Courtly love, at least from its literary origins, is in principle about objectless desire, and this opens it in the direction of transcendence toward the indescribable. Of his two “friends” (“amies”), Agnes and Ermessen, William’s persona does not know where, or even whether, they have ever done anything to please him or not. The woman, as object of desire, is essentially a creation of desire in its narcissistic self-​enclosure. William’s love of pleasure, his “joi d’amor,” in the courtly poems, is strongly interiorized. If Guilhem’s name originally connoted his being a jokester (his “willfulness” or “will” at the “helm”), we might read its English equivalent as “Will I am.” Particularly in the context of his gaily and giddily playful verse, formal play becomes the very substance of his poems, as of those of the Troubadours more generally, with a premium placed on prosodic technique. In “Ben vuelh que sapchon li pluzor,” William names himself “master craftsman” (“Qu’ieu ai nom ‘maiestre certa’ ”). Ezra Pound associated this revalorizing of conscious artistry and consummate craftsmanship in the rebirth of poetic lyric among the Troubadours especially with Arnaut Daniel, whom Dante designated as the superlative craftsman or artisan of the vernacular or the “mother tongue” (“il miglior fabbro del parlar materno,” Purgatorio XXVI.117).13 Pound was himself in turn offered this honorific by T.  S. Eliot in the latter’s dedication to him of The Waste Land (1922). The craft in question is perhaps most fully displayed in the elaborate formal system of the sestina. Invented by Arnaut and taken up by Dante in his Rime CI–CII, it consists in six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three-​line envoi. The six terminal words ending the lines in each stanza are the same, but they are rotated in a regular pattern from stanza to stanza. They are then condensed into double doses in each of the last

13 Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (New  York: New Directions, 2005 [1910]), Chapter 2: “Il Miglior Fabbro.”

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Origins of Lyric Reflection in Nothing  49 three lines of the poem. A  powerful machine of self-​reflection—​with power to intensify technical dexterity and mastery more than, or at least alongside, spiritual sublation—​becomes manifest here. The resources of self-​ reflection in language make both directions of development—​ the technical and spiritual—​possible. This underlying ambivalence of self-​ reflection is followed out in its duplicitous consequences especially in Part IV, section 52. In these ways, the value of art as a means of renewal is affirmed from the beginning of the Troubadour tradition. This poetry proclaims a new birth of individual awareness in the artist’s self-​conscious cultivation of craft. The invention of “new song” (“novel chan”) is conxtualized by the sweetness (“dolchor”) of the “new time” (“temps novel”) of spring in Williams’s “Ab la dolchor de temps novel.” Art is a self-​reflective means employed by the human subject just coming to consciousness of its original powers of creation—​of echoing and appropriating the energy and inspiration of the Creation all around. This is a birth of modern consciousness centered on the self-​reflexive self, but still with a constitutive relation to the other, to the universe as a whole, and to its creative Source. Reflexivity enfolds the ability to generate from its own self-​relation this relation outward and inward that is at the core of this new resource discovered by Troubadour lyric. Such creation arises immanently, without depending on relation to anything else that is independently and objectively present. Yet the self-​engendering self is not isolated and cut off but rather itself encompassed in a wider circle of self-​reflection that it reflects.

Primary Narcissism or the Death Duel of Self with Nothing This is the genealogical line for Dante’s “poetics of praise” as outlined in the Vita nuova XVIII–​XIX. Dante discovers the principle of a poetics that is generated from within by internal relations and motivations so that his inspiration cannot be taken away from him (“che non mi puote venire meno,” XVIII.4), not even when it is directed outside itself and beyond in epideixis of his lady as object of praise. He can cultivate his offering of praise in complete independence from how it is received and judged, including his being mocked (gabbato, XIV–​XV) by others. Thus, he can put an end to the (Cavalcantian) drama centered on his own symptomatology as a despairing lover. This stem cell in the Vita nuova will be developed into the full-​blown primary narcissism of lyric self-​reflexivity in the Paradiso. Narcissism is the radical logical and psychological structure underlying this mode of lyric. In “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (“Zur Einführung des Narzißmus,” 1914), Sigmund Freud hypothesizes a universal “primary Narcisissm,” and the mobile polysemousness of the notion among his followers is notorious. Julia Kristeva employs the notion of “primary Narcisissm” in describing an “immediate identification without object” in Freud and in Lacan’s mirror stage (Histoires d’amour, 53–​56). It is an

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50 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language “archaic reduplication” prior to any possible choice of object, an “auto-​ eroticism” necessary and constitutive for the “unification” of a subject. Oral, incorporative, and introjective, it belongs to the “oral stage.” Dante’s Paradiso climaxes also in images of regression to an infantile state (XXXIII.106–​8), which, psychoanalytically, might be understood as embodying a type of primary narcissism (see section 48). For Dante, it is an imitation of an infantile state by the deliberate act of a subject, whereas what psychoanalysis calls “primary narcissism” is prior to any distinct identity of the subject and does not pivot from an already established subjective identity. Prior to subjectivity and to any choice of object, the energy of the libido is already actively invested in relation to itself. This pre-​subjective state, moreover, remains latent throughout the course of later development. The primary identification of Einfühlung or “feeling-​ one” that is pre-​ objectival and pre-​ Oedipal is also of the order of the unsayable (“indicible”). Kristeva equates it with Lacan’s “objet petit ‘a,’ ” which she explains as an ungraspable non-​object of the order of the phantasm. It is in reality a “metaphoric object” and a “transport” of “auto-​erotic motility” into the unifying instance that constitutes the “me” as one. For Kristeva, furthermore, primary narcissism, as original, immediate identification, is correlated with the void, with exposure of being “not all” (“pas tout”) and with the gap (“béance”) of the mirror. In her words, “The chasms of the narcissistic void” (“les abimes du vide narcissique”) remain beneath the fragile constructions of the self (Histoires d’amour, 59). Similarly to lyric language, courtly love, understood in such terms, represents an absolute or zero degree of subjectivity in which dedication to the beloved risks being exposed as primarily a relation to self that absorbs the lover totally in a sort of narcissistic fixation. Lyrical lovers from Tristan and Troilus to Petrarch and Romantic poets are also notorious narcissists. For all their professedly self-​sacrificing, self-​abasing devotion to their ladies, their unconditional adoration is at crucial points unmasked as pure pretext for the creation of their poems. Poets exploit their loves for the purpose of projecting an idealized image of themselves and the beauty of their creations. The beloved other who is evoked and cathected with such overweening passion is exposed as really only a confected image of the lover’s own ego-​ideal. And yet this movement of absolutization can be opened up into a form of transcendence from within. The subject’s self-​reflection can be discovered to be not just a terminal end-​in-​itself but rather an imitation of an ideal that utterly and unutterably transcends it. Lyric language, with its concentrated self-​reflexivity, is peculiarly open to and oriented toward this type of self-​transcendence. The self-​ reflexive structure in question is Trinitarian, at least for Dante and particularly in the context of the Paradiso. Its model is the divine Being, the Trinity, which creates and continuously generates out of its infinite self-​reflection and self-​love. The miracle realized already in courtly love and lyric, which lays down certain crucial poetic premises for

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Origins of Lyric Reflection in Nothing  51 the Paradiso, is that self-​reflexivity is not a dead-​end but instead produces an opening to a transcendent love and ideal truth. Here we can speak of “originary narcissism” not as a temporally primary stage but rather as a structuration of drives that gives them a unified self-​referential sense.14 Although at risk of collapsing into a circumscribed and deadly form of self-​enclosure, the circuit of love and lyric can also embody a powerful dynamic propelling the self beyond itself toward the absolutely other and even toward divinity. However, this alchemical transformation of self-​ referentiality from death to life, as its orientation converts from self to other, does not take place without passing through the most rigorous reduction of self to nothing—​in fact, not without a terrifying confrontation with death and nothingness. This death-​drama can be found staged from the very origins of modern lyric tradition in the Troubadours, and it continues through to many modern and late-​modern spin-​offs. It travels to Hegel’s abiding with the negative in order to make it productive, notably through the slave’s fear of death, which he converts through work into mastery (Phenomenology, Chapter IV). It shows up again in the implosion of the idealization of Beauty into abject self-​loathing in Baudelaire’s verses oscillating between Spleen and Idéal.15 It girates from Mallarmé’s taking destruction as his Beatrice (“La Destruction fut ma Béatrice”) to the dizzyingly punning linguistic annihilations of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.16 Narcissism can entail confronting the self’s intrinsic Nothingness—​as suggested by Caravaggio’s painting (see frontispiece to this volume, xvii), in which the reflected image is barely visible to the viewer and perhaps not even to Narcissus himself. Caravaggio’s Narcissus gazes into a dark pond that seems more to engulf than to send back his image. One might well imagine him to be contemplating his own death. Understood thus, narcissism can be a means of spiritual advancement through self-​reflection. It results eventually in the death of the ego for the sake of release into God. In any case, not the image as such but the act of self-​reflection itself stands forth as decisive for determining what Narcissus sees—​as also for determining what the viewer sees or rather projects onto this dis-​appearing image. The image blends out into the totality signified by the circle composed by the subject’s outspread arms taken together with their reflection in the water, which swallows all in bottomless darkness.17

14 Jérôme Glas, “Narcissisme originaire et organisation spéculaire,” Revu française de psychanalyse 72/​4 (2008): 1081–​98. 15  Fabrice Wilhelm, Baudelaire: L’écriture du narcissisme (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999). 16  Mallarmé is quoted from his letter to Eugène Lefébure, May 27, 1867. I read Joyce in this key in Part II of Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 97–​158. 17 See seminal interpretations by Hubert Damisch, “D’un Narcisse l’autre,” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 13 (1976): 109–​46, and “Deux figures du Narcisse,” in Texte-​ Image/​Bild-​Text (Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin, 1988), 123–​29.

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52 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language Interpreted thus, narcissism is not an aberration of human nature, but a condition of its “perfection.”18 Losing oneself in a kind of mystic death is necessary for gaining God.19 It entails an opening and springing forth in relation to nothing in particular, “the void.” The regression to a state before the subject–​object split, which Dante insistently figures toward the end of the Paradiso in the image of the infant at the mother’s breast (XXX.82–​84; XXXIII.106–​8), characterizes the mystic’s quest.

18 Pleshette DeArmitt, The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-​ possible Self-​ love (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014) defends narcissism as constitutive of the self and “open to the other as other” (96) in studies of Lacan, Kristeva, and Derrida. 19 Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), tells this story of a mors mystica as the existential quest to realize the “nondualist” metaphysics of the Commedia. In his review, in Religion and Literature 47/​2 (2016): 166–​68, of my Dante and the Sense of Transgression: ‘The Trespass of the Sign’ (2013), Moevs makes a telling point. He maintains that aspects of the Paradiso’s negative theology that I bring to the fore through emphasizing its affinities with postmodern thinking of difference in contemporary French philosophy can sometimes be stated with greater precision in terms of Dante’s own medieval sources. In Part II of the present book, especially sections 17–​25, I aim to show that what Moevs wonderfully expounds as a timeless metaphysics of the Middle Ages, and as experientially verified and enacted by Dante, can be more accurately historicized in terms of a precise moment of crisis in the history of metaphysics with Duns Scotus. I discuss liabilities of Moevs’s monolithic treatment of medieval metaphysics in “Equivocations of ‘Metaphysics’: A Debate with Christian Moevs’s The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy,” Philosophy and Theology 20/​1–​2 (2009):  29–​52.

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6  The Circularity of Song—​and its Mystic Upshot

Eminently among Romance philologists, Paul Zumthor analyzes the object of love in the trouvère lyric of northern France as the song or “chant” itself.1 The self-​enclosure of lyric is manifest as a loving-​singing equivalence. Zumthor constructs the triad: aimer—​chanter—​trouver, in which the equivalence of loving, singing, and poem-​making or “finding” (“trouver” being taken as the root for “trouvère”) removes all transitivity from lyric discourse. There is no “hors du chant,” nothing outside the song—​a formulation that tellingly echoes Jacques Derrida’s renowned dictum “there is nothing outside the text” (“il n’y a pas de hors-​texte”). In Zumthor’s words, “to sing, which is to love (and vice versa), action without object … engenders its own substantiation, the song, which is love (and vice versa)” (136). As a consequence, he can say that the song is the object, or equivalently the subject, of itself: “The song is thus its own subject” (“La chanson est ainsi son propre sujet,” 139). This entails, moreover, that it is “its own meaning” (“son propre sens”) and that, according to the enabling metaphor of this entire cluster of conceits, “The poem is the mirror of itself” (“Le poème est miroir de soi,” 139). This reflexivity of lyric displaces representational content and proclaims the logical anteriority of the song to the story it tells or to the fiction it actualizes (138). Singing, at this point, is freed from any proper sense and is turned by a sort of catachresis into “a pure vocative in expansion” (“un pur vocatif en expansion”). As such, it is “anterior or posterior to all communication in the proper sense” (“antérieur ou postérieur à toute communication proprement dite,” 137). The entire text examined as sample is to be seen, accordingly, as an expansion of the verb “chanter” (“to sing”) in the initial strophe and again of the nominative form of “chanson” at the end in the envoi. This lexical item, “chanson” for “song,” occurs there “topographically” with an allocutive or apostrophic function in a vocative or imperative indicating the goal or final cause of the singing (chanter/​chanson).

1 Paul Zumthor, “De la circularité du chant (à propos des trouvères des xiie et xiiie siècles),” Poétique 2 (1970): 129–​40.

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54 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language Kristeva similarly suggests that the joi (joy) of this song is an immediate expression of jouissance without referential significance (“Il ne porte pas de signification référentielle, objective”) in situating Troubadour chant in her history of Christian spirituality and more generally of “love” (Histoires d’amour, 349). She illustrates the exceeding of signification by joi and the primacy of affect over sense through detailed linguistic analysis of ambiguity wrought by semantic contamination due to homophones and neighboring sonorities in Arnaut Daniel’s “En cest sonet coind’e lèri” [“To this light tune, precious and gay”], a “masterpiece of song on the song” (“chef d’oeuvre de chant sur le chant,” 353). Kristeva points out, furthermore, that Guillaume de Lorris’s portion of the Roman de la rose (c. 1230) in langue d’oeil seems to be a “quest for a ‘covert’ sense transcending the literal” (“quête du sens ‘couvert’ transcendant le sens littéral,” 362). This poetic or allegorical sense referring to some higher reality than the Rose itself is rooted in interior vision (“vision interne”) and constitutes the space of love and of writing as a “narcissistic universe” (362). It creates not a fiction but rather an analogical reality. Such is the true sense of Guillaume’s discourse, and Kristeva herself sees this as pointing to the “narcissistic” visions of Dante’s Paradiso (362). These allegorical visions are, nonetheless, potentially theological in tenor. Zumthor hints at the theological underpinnings of this conception of poetic language and its creative “making” based on the “lexical trinities” and the “emanation” or diffusion of being from singing as modeled on Scholastic, originally Neoplatonic conceptions of divine Creation by diffusion of the Good, an Absolute “diffusif de soi” and the producer of its own sense (134). Zumthor is working on Trouvère chanson, which is more controlled, abstract, and ascetic than Troubadour song, with its exuberant imagination and expression. However, we have already seen with William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, that the essential structures of self-​ reflection, with their metaphysical resonances, are no less discernible also from the beginning of the Troubadour lyric tradition. In the background of Troubadour lyric is the mystical theology of William of St. Thierry and Richard of St. Victor, among others. This has been demonstrated in the critical scholarship, even if not all scholars are convinced that the Christian influence is specific and deliberate rather than more a matter of general cultural background of the Latin liturgy and Marian cult.2 The influence of Christian mysticism is perhaps most demonstrable with reference specifically to the lark figure3—​on which we will dwell shortly in section 8. In any case, an existential condition 2  Ulrich Mölk, Trobadorlyrik: Eine Einführung (München/​Zürich: Artemis, 1982), 37–​38, registers some reservations. 3 Luvia Lazzerini, “L’ ‘allodetta’ e il suo archetipo. La revalorazione dei temi mistici nella lirica trobadorica e nello stil novo,” in Sotto il segno di Dante. Scritti in onore di Francesco Mazzoni (Florence: Le Lettere, 1998), 165–​88.

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The Circularity of Song  55 underlying whatever cultural ideology and genealogy is at stake. Mystical theology opens a dimension of transcendence to the abyss of the Godhead, and this, too, is crucial to the structure of lyric as newly rediscovered by the Troubadours and as developed further by Dante in the Paradiso. The potential for infinite expansion of the poem radiating out from its own self-​reflective act of singing—​as mirroring and imitating the act of divine Creation—​is already clearly intimated in preceding lyric tradition. But it is played out on a vast scale by Dante, most deliberately and consequentially in the theological apotheosis of lyric poetry in the Paradiso.

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7  Self-​Reflexive Fulfillment in Lyric Tradition and its Theological Troping by Dante

The directly manifestational function of language, its faculty of modeling and in some sense making present a higher degree of reality through self-​ reflexivity, was discovered and exploited already by the Troubadours. The language of song was created by them as possessed of a purpose and meaning all its own. It was not circumscribed by its functioning for directly realistic reference, even though it was supposedly directed to an Other, a superior instance embodied in the lady who was extolled and supplicated. This destination, as is effectively emphasized by Zumthor, tended to lose its objectivity and to become confounded with the song in love with itself. The lady demanding unconditional devotion as domina models the presence of a transcendent ground of meaning in the language of lyric, and precisely this transcendent dimension is what undergoes theological transumption in the Paradiso. It is prepared for by the indispensable precedent of the Vita nuova.1 Developed on this basis, the lyricism of the Paradiso serves as a clue to a largely hidden telos of the lyrical impulse at an historical moment particularly favorable for interpreting its metaphysical significance. Dante understood his effort as vernacular poet as stemming from the tradition of the Italian lyricists and their Troubadour predecessors in Occitanea. Both in the Commedia (most concentratedly in Purgatorio XXIV–​ XXVI) and in De vulgari eloquentia, Book II, Dante lavishes attention on this lyric tradition as forerunner to his own poetry. However, one of his most radical and far-​reaching innovations is to trope this tradition with theology. The theological bent or bias is potentially present within this tradition from its origins, but Dante makes theology programmatically the originary ground of the poetic and prophetic word in his Commedia. In doing so, he is building on the work of predecessors such as Alanus de Insulis in medieval Latin poetic tradition. Alanus’s De planctu Naturae is already a profoundly theological poem that claims to be the transcription of a divinely inspired dream. Even 1 In “Dante’s New Life and the New Testament: An Essay on the Hermeneutics of Revelation,” The Italianist 31 (2011): 335–​66, I examine this stage of the theologization of lyric. This interpretation, expanded into a book, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

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Self-Reflexive Fulfillment  57 more directly anticipating the Divine Comedy in his Anticlaudianus, Alanus writes: maiorem nunc tendo liram totumque poetam deponens, usurpo mihi nova verba prophetae. Caelesti Musae terrenus cedet Apollo, Musa Iovi, verbisque poli parentia cedent verba soli, tellusque locum concedet Olimpo.2

         (5.268–​ 72)

(A greater lyre I now tune, putting down that of the poet entirely, I now claim for myself the new words of the prophet. Earthly Apollo gives way to the heavenly Muse, And the Muse to Jove; words of the soil yield obediently to words Of the polestar, and the earth cedes its place to Olympus.) Furthermore, the commentary tradition of the school of Chartres, particularly with Bernard Silvestris, anticipates in a more purely Platonic, sometimes frankly pagan key, aspects of Dante’s theological understanding of poetry.3 These works illustrate the claims of poetry to mediate and transmit theological revelation. Still, Dante learned how to realize such revelation performatively as lyrical presence in language most essentially from vernacular tradition and especially from the Troubadours. Performance here passes to writing itself—and to how it is read. As practiced originally by the Troubadours, lyric is the supreme poetry of presence, of jouissance and of sensual plenitude. This is so in spite of (and sometimes because of) the fact that this poetry is also predicated on absence, on the necessary unattainability of its object—​paradigmatically, the beloved. It is grounded in a striving after transcendence in the form of the Other as the beloved and reverenced lady, but also in a feeding upon the self in the immanence of the self’s own self-​consuming celebration of its joy in singing. That joy is a fullness in its very emptiness of external content. It ferries along a concomitant foregrounding of the purely formal properties of language. This paradox already becomes apparent in the vernacular lyric tradition that Dante historically reconstructs in his treatise on the vulgar tongue (De vulgari eloquentia) and into which he inscribes his own work as a maker of verses, a “rhymer” (“rimatore”

2 Alan of Lille, Literary Works, ed. Winthrop Wetherby (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 380. My translation. 3 Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). Ernst Robert Curtius’s Europäische Literatur und Lateinsiches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1948), trans. Willard R.  Trask as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Bollingen, 1952) remains an orienting landmark in this Platonic landscape. See especially 118–​23, plus ­chapter 12 on “Poesie und Theologie.”

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58 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language or “dicitore per rima” Vita nuova XXV.7). Dante gives this tradition a theological twist in his own poetic magnum opus, thereby fully realizing its inherent significance. Not only his youthful lyrics, but most importantly his last poetry in the Paradiso, with its emblematic rose rounded into a celestial amphitheater, is animated by this extraordinary reinvention of lyric. The Paradiso is an apotheosis of lyric that renews and reveals, as never before, the theologically inspired origins of modern tradition in the vernacular. Most conspicuously, the Roman de la rose offers Dante a literary precedent and paradigm for the image of the celestial white rose, the “candida rosa,” that mirrors God in the assembly of the blessed souls enjoying the beatific vision in Paradiso XXX–​XXXII. The scene is described with an insistence on self-​reflexivity that brings to culmination this overarching motif structuring in filigree Dante’s entire text. The dynamics of a creative and fecund narcissism are omnipresent in the first 4,058 verses of the Roman de la rose by Guillaume de Lorris. The ensuing satirical sequel penned by Jean de Meung generally takes, instead, a pessimistic view of merely linguistic reflexivity. Jean advocates, instead, for literal, physical, profane reproduction. Nonetheless, the positive potential and fecundity of reflection is presupposed and is already clamoring for notice among the Troubadours at the courtly origins of modern lyric poetry, and for Dante its basis is theological. God creates through desire, a desire to see his own being’s likeness mirrored in other beings—​indeed a “narcissistic” desire for his own image reflected back to himself. God redeems and sanctifies and beatifies his creation out of this same “self-​seeking” motive. By “just desire” (“giusta voglia”), he “wills his whole court to be like himself” (“vuol simile a sé tutta sua corte,” III.44–​45). Dante celebrates a new awakening to awareness of self as reflected in the Other in the fresh light of springtime as urged on by the innate promptings of desire, the natural animations of love, in a self-​reflexive rhetoric that expresses a budding sensibility and consciousness. He heralds the onset of the new literature and culture of the modern world. He pictures desire of the kind represented by the self-​reflexive jouissance of lyric ecstasy in the lark’s objectless singing for sheer joy that embodies just such a creative narcissism. This desire powers the perception whereby things can again be perceived in their origin and ontological truth.

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8  The Lark Motif and its Echoes

Lyric language invents an outstanding emblem for itself in the skylark. Poets from early on in modern tradition had identified with this bird as figuring a celestial ascent of song—​followed by descent into silence. This emblem appears prominently in Dante’s Paradiso in the simile of the alodetta launched singing into the sky in celebration of the miraculous salvation (in spite of its seeming impossibility) of the pre-​Christian Trojan warrior Riphaeus: Quale allodetta che ’n aere si spazia   prima cantando, e poi tace contenta   de l’ultima dolcezza che la sazia, tal mi sembiò l’imago de la ’mprenta   de l’etterno piacere, al cui disio   ciascuna cosa qual ell’è diventa.

         (XX.73–​ 78)

(Like the lark, which flings itself into the air,   first singing, and then goes silent, content   with the ultimate sweetness that satiates it, so seemed to me the image of the imprint   of the eternal pleasure, at whose desire   each thing becomes what it is.) The simile of the skylark represents not only a lyrical climax in Dante’s text: it intimates also a meditation on the nature of lyric and its attunement to the governing structures of the universe as hinging on Justice. Not by accident, the simile occurs in the Heaven of Jove, the heaven of the just souls. Self-​reflexive verbs, used prodigally and sometimes pleonastically, consistently structure all that is enacted here. The action is reflexive: the lark flings or disports itself, or, more literally, “expatiates itself” (“si spazia”). This gives a specifically reflexive inflection to the idea of flying at large, or of sweeping through the heaven. In this case, such self-​reflexivity is a revelation of a higher desire or eternal

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60 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language pleasure that reveals all things as what they truly are. In this “eternal pleasure” (“etterno piacere”), “each thing becomes what it is” (“ciascuna cosa qual ell’è diventa”).1 The surpassing height at which the lark flies hints at the symbol’s revelatory status. In lyric tradition, the lark is a symbol for song transporting the singer beyond the confines of consciously calculated art by the spontaneous rapture of poetic ecstasy. Thanks especially to Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” the lark enraptured by its own song seems to us still today an apt, if not an inevitable, image for the lyric poet rapt to heaven on the wings of poesy:      Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!        Bird thou never  wert,      That from heaven, or near it,        Pourest thy full  heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.2 In the Middle Ages, the topos had already been given lapidary expression by Bernart de Ventadorn:      Can vei la lauzeta mover      De joi sas alas contral rai,     Que s’oblid’ e.s laissa chazer      Per la doussor c’al cor li vai … .

      (Goldin,  144)

(When I see the lark move with joy its wings against the ray [of the sun]. so that it forgets itself and lets itself fall because of the sweetness that invades its heart … .) The reflexive verbs here are already structurally indispensible for the self-​ forgetting (“s’oblid’ ”) and for the action of letting oneself be enthralled in self-​abandon (“.s laissa”) to the sweetness of song in one’s own heart. Italian imitators of Bernart, such as Bondie Dietaiuti (mid-​thirteenth century), in the entourage of Frederick II in Sicily, did not fail to transmit this important feature of the emblematic songbird, which, by its own singing, becomes enamored (“tanto si ’inamura”). This self-​enamorment 1  Franco Ferrucci, Il poema del desiderio: Poetica e passione in Dante (Milan: Leonardo, 1990) prefers to understand desire in this passage on the lark as desire not of God but of every thing (“ciascuna cosa”) which becomes what it should be through the desire for God. Nonetheless, he too perceives a “dialectic between being and becoming, between Creator and creature,” such that “everything realizes its full innate potential only by remaining immersed in the desire of God” (“immersa continuamente nel desiderio di Dio,” 251). 2  https://​www.poetryfoundation.org/​poems/​45146/​to-​a-​skylark. Accessed 7/​29/​2020

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The Lark Motif and its Echoes  61 is seemingly objectless and “comes” from on high into the heart of the lark, which mounts skyward and then falls precipitously, in the simile that opens Bondie’s poem: Madonna, me è avenuto simigliante com de la spera a l’ascelletta vene, che sormonta, guardandola, ’n altura e poi dichina, lassa, inmantenante per lo dolzore ch’a lo cor le vene e frange in terra, tanto si ’namura.3 (Madam, it is with me as with the lark that mounts the sphere on high and beholding it, from that height then plummets immediately, exhausted by the sweetness that comes to its heart, and crashes to earth, so much it is in love.) The exhaustion and precipitous fall of the lark, moreover, suggests a metaphorical death that opens a space of negation from which flight can issue again renewed. But the full speculative potential of this image of self-​ reflexive mirroring first comes into its own in the theological and cosmological context of the Paradiso. Dante moves the imagery of reflection (“l’imago de la ’mprenta”) into an explicitly ontological register in which everything becomes what it (truly) is (“ciascuna cosa qual ell’è diventa”). In Dante, furthermore, this simile does not stand alone. It occurs in series with a number of other bird similes that serve diversely to illuminate its various facets. Dante refracts the special functions of reflection onto other emblematic birds that form a kind of suite in crescendo. This genre of soaring birds reaches a climax in modern lyric tradition with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Windhover” in its ecstatic flight reflecting Christ’s exaltation through humiliation. Comparing the skylark image with the other bird images that adorn Dante’s heaven of Jupiter reveals that the other aviary figures display closely analogous patterns of lyricism and self-​reflexiveness. The revolving of the stork around its nest after feeding its young is likewise reflexively expressed (“Quale sovresso il nido si rigira …”) in a manner resembling that of the image of the imperial eagle (“cotal si fece,” 94) hovering over Dante, who has just been fed with explanations concerning divine Justice: Quale sovresso il nido si rigira   poi c’ha pasciuti la cicogna i figli,   e come quel ch’è pasto la rimira; cotal si fece, e sì leväi i cigli, 3  Le rime della scuola siciliana, 2 vols., ed. Bruno Panvini (Florence: Olschki, 1962–​64).

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62 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language   la benedetta imagine, che l’ali   movea sospinte da tanti consigli.

        (XIX.91–​ 96)

(As above the nest the stork turns about   after it has fed its young,   and as the one just fed looks back upward; so the blessed image made itself, and so   I raised my brows, as the wings   moved, pushed along by so many counsels.) Dante is nourished, by the many soul-​lights composing the eagle, with the wisdom that justice simply is whatever is “consonant” (“consuona”) with “the first Will”: La prima Volontà, ch’è da sé buona da sé, ch’è sommo Ben, mai non si mosse.           (XIX.86–​ 87)

(The first Will, which is in itself good, from itself, the highest Good, has never changed.) So God and Justice, as sources of the jubilation, are likewise described here in wholly self-​referential and self-​reflexive terms. It is tautological for the first Will to will itself as the highest Good. Dante is using self-​ reflection as the key to exposition of the great doctrines of Christianity ranging from the nature of God to the justification of wrong in the world by theodicy. God’s infinity reflexively measures itself only with itself (“non ha fine e sé con sé misura,” XIX.51), since there can be only one absolute infinity, and it is infinitely in excess of everything else. All other things are susceptible of defects or lack because of their inability to receive the full measure of such perfection: Non poté suo valor sì fare impresso   in tutto l’universo che ’l suo Verbo   non rimanesse in infinito eccesso.

         (XIX.43–​ 45)

(Its value could not impress itself so   in the whole universe that its Word   not remain in infinite excess.) Canto XIX thus delivers the Paradiso’s Job-​like theodicy. The infinite disproportion of the Creator to the creation makes it impossible for finite intelligence to understand divine Justice.

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The Lark Motif and its Echoes  63 The bird images hover over and metaphorically revolve around this issue of exceeding earthbound intelligence by the grace of revelation. Precisely where the question of divine justice exceeds Dante’s capacities, the unhooded falcon springs into action (XIX.34–​39). A canto later, the incredible fact (“chi crederebbe?”) of Ripheus’s salvation modulates into the melodious riff of the skylark in XX.73–​78. Where no words can suffice to explain, lyrical vibrations move in to take up the slack—​ with a fluttering of wings. Lyrical flourish and musical rapture take flight where reasoned discourse can no longer make headway. The self-​reflexive shining and resonance of these images substitutes for any more articulate explanation, which is simply not possible because of the unbridgeable gap between finite and infinite intelligence. Although God cannot be understood or encompassed, self-​reflective performances are still a way of reflecting and participating in something of God’s total oneness with Godself. By reflecting this higher Good, even mortal and creaturely limits paradoxically become means of enjoyment of the unlimited, the highest and greatest Good. The Eagle itself does not understand why Ripheus was saved. No created intelligence has ever sounded the depth of grace welling from the first wave of the primal fountain (XX.118–​20). Yet at just this pass—​or impasse—​the Eagle breaks into celebration of its own song, as if celebrating its own limitations were a way of acknowledging and praising a greater good. Even their lack of understanding is sweet to the blessed (“ ed ènne dolce così fatto scemo”), since they are trained simply to will what God wills (“che quel che vuol Iddio e noi volemo,” XX.136–​38). Their good is “refined” and perfected in this higher good of God (“perché il ben nostro in questo ben s’affina”). Their peace is in his will, as was announced early on by Piccarda (“ ‘E ’n la sua voluntade è nostra pace,’ ” III.85). Reflecting on their own finite limits turns the blessed to the infinite, in which their deficiency or negativity is sublated into willing and rejoicing in a greater harmony and whole than they can attain to by themselves.

Ontological Resonances of Self-​Reflection Feeding one’s own brood in the nest—​or reproducing oneself through nutritive action—​is an extended enactment of self-​reflection. So are the functions of celebration and aesthetic display of beauty, without which such acts would remain hidden. Finally, we can double back to the beginning of the series, according to the narrative sequence of the poem. The cloying concentration of reflexive verbiage in the falcon simile of XIX.34–​39 clinches the key significance of self-​reflexiveness for these lyrical interludes and reflects on the very essence of the lyric as self-​reflexive:     Quasi falcone ch’esce del cappello,      move la testa e con l’ali si plaude,

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64 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language     voglia mostrando e facendosi bello    vid’io farsi quel segno, che di laude      de la divina grazia era contesto,     con canti quai si sa chi là sù gaude.              (XIX.34–​ 39)

(Like a falcon that emerges from its hood,   moves its head and with its wings applauds itself,   demonstrating desire and making itself glorious, so I saw that sign form itself, which with praise   of the divine grace is woven together,   with songs self-​known by those alone who rejoice above.) The last of these verses in particular evinces the consonantal series of hard, clicking cs (joined by a likewise hard g and q) interwoven with sibillants that makes for an intensively self-​reflexive sound pattern. This alliterative and assonantal repetition ties these passages together by an additional bond that binds them into Dante’s implicit theory of lyrical language as constituted by self-​reflection. The praise motif of “laude,” which echoes here in the reflexive verb “si plaude,” recalls Dante’s definition of lyric poetry as praise in Vita nuova XVIII.9 and resonates with the lark’s name. In Dante’s Italian, the word “allodetta” itself contains an intimation of praise, including notably liturgical praise—​lode. The name of the lark thus becomes a pure signifier that reflects the meaning it takes on in this context, as if its vocation to praise were written into it as an etymological index of its destiny finally reached in this poem. The self-​feeding of lyrical rapture produces a satiety that interprets itself ontologically as a sort of plenitude, or even surfeit, of being. Most explicitly portrayed in Dante’s skylark image in XX.73–​78, this plenitude is a self-​reflexive fullness that is produced by lyric song. It is the ultimate sweetness (“l’ultima dolcezza”) in which contentment can be attained only in the instant when singing becomes silence (“prima cantando, poi tace contenta”). This lyric singing transpires in time, with its before and after, its “prima” and “poi,” but it is no longer subject to the unfulfillment of time. Time is transcended but also retained—​aufgehoben or sublated—​ into the contentment that suspends time and the activity of singing that has made this contentment possible. Singing fulfills itself in silence, and this is the moment of its truth. As the simile moves from vehicle to tenor, the ontological import of self-​reflection is expressly asserted. Dante’s alodetta is described as “the image of an imprint” (“l’imago de la ’mprenta”), suggesting how this image produces itself out of its own reflected being. And yet, beyond itself and its own image, it still reflects “the eternal pleasure” (“l’etterno piacere”) of the divine Creator, who is well-​pleased with what he has created, just as in Genesis 1:31.

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The Lark Motif and its Echoes  65 The self-​absorbed, but also other-​inspired and self-​propagating, joy of the lark’s singing has thus served as a reflection of the divine joy in creating—​a pleasure in or by whose desire (“al cui disio”) everything becomes what it is (“ciascuna cosa qual ell’è diventa”). Each thing here is conceived out of the joy that is condensed in the lyric word. Such was also Adam’s first word—​his primiloquium—​spoken in joy (a gaudio) to his Creator, outside of whom is no joy (“nullum gaudium sit extra Deum, sed totum in Deo”) and who is himself all joy (“ipse Deus totus sit gaudium”), in De vulgari eloquentia I.iv.4. Lyric—​and the creative joy that it embodies—​reveals things in their emergence from their original ideation and conceiving in love by the divine Creator, who is pleased with them, pleased that they should exist. From the outset of the cantica, Dante’s desire to know the Cause of his sensations in Paradise is ignited with unprecedented acuteness by the music of the spheres (I.82–​84). This desire is satisfied self-​reflexively through his own poetic creation. The perception of things in their ontological truth directly in and through pleasure at the source of their Creation by the loving regard of God is repeated and renewed in poetic creation as emblematized by the lark’s singing. Such creation by artistic mimesis incarnates its joy in motion and song and in beauty and praise. It is a mirroring that makes real rather than producing only a virtual ersatz or mere image. Such reflection is, in some respects, like the mirror in the Roman de la rose that produces “all being” (“tot l’estre”), “without deception” (“sans decevoir,” 1561)  or illusion. The capacity of the mirror to totalize the being of the thing similarly registers in Geoffrey of Vinsauf, who in his Poetria Nova writes that in the mirror the “whole thing” is reflected (Ecce rei speculum; res tota relucet in illo, 712; see section 39). However, desire’s making all things what they are in Dante is a giant step beyond simply reflecting all things in their truth and wholeness. Transcendental philosophy, beginning with Duns Scotus and developing in a modern, Kantian sense, will provide one angle of perception on this step toward productive self-​consciousness. These precedents and successors to Dante’s discourse of reflection will be explored in Parts II–​IV. We must not forget, especially in the context of Jupiter as the heaven of Justice, that the divine “imprint” that satisfies the eagle is, furthermore, the image of divine Justice. Justice is the supreme principle of order in the Creation and, even more directly, in the afterlife. This principle, reflected throughout the universe, reaches all the way to Hell, where the inscription over the gate announced: “Justice moved my high Maker” (“Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore,” Inferno III.4). It is the image of Justice, fundamentally, that each creature in Paradise enjoys as the idealized image of its own being. As Saint Augustine had observed in De trinitatis VIII.ix, the image of Justice in the soul impels it to become what it is. Augustine thereby articulated an important theological premise for

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66 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language just such a lyrical apotheosis as we find represented in Dante’s verses on this “ultimate sweetness.” The affect of pleasure, in which things are originally created by a God who sees all that he creates, and sees that it is good (Genesis 1:10), can be recreated or repeated by the lyric ecstasy in which things are perceived anew in their emergence and are made to be what they are according to God’s good pleasure or love. And everything is what it truly is only in this timelessly creative vision leveraged from Love. Things are perceived, in turn, as all that they can be as refracted by the poet’s creative love and desire—​and by their reflective repetition in the meditative and perceptive act of reading.

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9  An Otherness Beyond Objective Representation and Reference

This cluster of bird images intimates the power of self-​reflection to gesture toward—​and even to imitate and incarnate through artistic creation—​a dimension that otherwise simply eludes rational comprehension. As Dante put it in XIX.44–​45, the Creator’s Verbum remains in infinite excess (“in infinito eccesso”) of any of His created works. A kind of power of signifying or of revealing in lyric language surpasses the scope of ordinary reference ad extra not necessarily by nullifying it so much as by restructuring it. The self-​reflexivity of language need not be a means of reducing everything to just language. It can, instead, be a revelation of an otherness that transcends language in a more fine and sublime way than that of straightforward referentiality to terminal, finite objects in an external world. Such self-​reflexivity may point to the presence (always compounded also of absence) of something unrepresentable, something absolutely other than and beyond (or before) conceptual language, something therefore that the ordinary linguistic function of reference can never quite capture. In effect, it can only be figured. It admits of no direct or adequate statement. And the most appropriate figurations are self-​reflexive because they enact its own inherent dynamism. Self-​referentiality is recognized by a millenary theological tradition—​and is recognized also poetically by Dante—​as the key to figuration of the unrepresentable. The absolutely Other is unsayable, and it can only be evoked, since it cannot be properly referred to or conceptually grasped. It can be evoked by self-​reference—​by language that turns attention reflexively on itself and points up its own inadequacy rather than pretending to be transparent to things. This is language that has no proper object besides language. Or better, its “object” is what language projects as its own “beyond.” It is what language cannot designate and describe but nevertheless gestures toward as beyond its reach by the failure of its ordinary referential function. Evocation through self-​referentiality is a more indirect way of relating to something other, something absolutely other—​which is what we ourselves are in our own transcendent Ground. As if miraculously, in lyrical language, self-​reflexivity becomes the reflection of a transcendence and, as such, an immanent presence of what Dante understands theologically

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68 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language as the Trinitarian divinity. Dante also unfailingly notes that this experience cannot be gathered into his words, that it transcends them and can be fathomed only by those for whom the direct experience of Paradise is reserved (I.72; X.70–​ 75, 145–​ 48; XIV.26, 106; XIX.39; XXI.19–​ 24, 141). Only they will have the keys necessary for deciphering the Paradiso’s figures. Still, the fact that these figures gesture towards something other, not in what they refer to, but precisely by turning reference back in a circle upon itself, indicates the circuitous shape of this path to transcendent otherness. This otherness cannot be signified as something completely or determinately outside all relation to the sign. It is indeterminately manifest in the sign itself, hence not in what the sign signifies but in the ongoing act and energy of signifying. Paradoxically, the ultimately unsignifiable otherness of God can be signified only as non-​ other to signifying itself.1 Language turned back on itself and exposing the nullity of its finite, representational contents can itself become manifest as the infinite medium in and out of which all things come to be (objectively). Starting from the poem’s opening tercet (“La gloria di colui … in una parte più e meno altrove”), Dante discovers through language the oneness of things along with their differential articulations, their unity in diversity, in what amounts to a linguistic monism and even a kind of aesthetic monotheism. All is grasped in and through language in its oneness as coming from and inhering in what cannot but be imagined as one supreme source or transcendent principle in which all things are connected. In language, everything is potentially connected with everything else and in a certain sense becomes one. Such a poetic vision involves a kind of linguistic mysticism. It delivers through language a revelation that is experiential rather than dogmatic. To this extent, there is an immanent presence of divinity in language. Especially lyrical language, such as Dante invents it in the Paradiso, is apt to reveal this presence and can make it to be felt in poetic-​linguistic experience. Apart from this intimate experience, such a transcendent presence is inexpressible and perhaps even imperceptible. A kind of immanence and presence are attained precisely in and through the experience of transcendence of the Source and of the absence of determinate form. To the extent that it registers in language in the first place, the “wholly other” can only be relatively or negatively so. The metaphysics of self-​ reflection are such that through self-​reflection we relate to an Other—​or even to a Whole that cannot be fathomed except as wholly other. The oneness in question is the whole of everything, but that precisely is what is categorically other with respect to all our finite, linguistic, human means 1 A paradoxical logic of God as the “non-​other” is worked out in depth and detail by Nicholas of Cusa in De non aliud (1462). I expound it in Chapter 3 of On the Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 93–​96.

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Otherness Beyond Objective Representation  69 of representing—​and even of conceiving a whole. This whole of reality in its infinity is concentrated into one as God. Such is the paradoxical figure produced by the reflection in which a self first makes itself whole but at the same time also renders itself imaginary and experiences itself as “not-​ all,” the “pas-​tout” (Lacan). It is broken open to relation with a beyond.2 Such reflective speculation on flight toward the transcendent takes wing, being launched by the bird images in Jove. But there is yet another simile of a bird that homes in on the goal toward which all these images converge. It occurs in a later heaven, the eighth, that of the fixed stars, which Dante enters into in Canto XXII.100 and expounds in Canto XXIII. This aviary emblem also belongs, albeit belatedly, to the representation through bird figures of lyrical self-​reflexivity in its theological implications. In certain outstanding ways, this figure is the climax of the series. The theme of joy in creation as transcending time in the eternal shape of the lyric circle traced out by self-​reflection in a Void is wrought to its highest pitch of emotional ecstasy and is brought to the furthest speculative reach of its theological significance in this exquisite vignette.

2 Dominik Finkelde, Excessive Subjektivität: Eine Theorie tathafter Neubegründung des Ethischen nach Kant, Hegel und Lacan (Freiburg im Breisgau: Karl Albert, 2015) demonstrates the transcendent grounding of pure self-​relation (“die Transzendenz der reinen Selbstbeziehung”) in German Idealism and (Lacanian) psychoanalysis in parallel.

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10  The Mother Bird’s Vigil—​Canto XXIII and the Lyric Circle

Some particular motifs and moments naturally display the self-​reflexive character of paradisiacal poetry more intensively than others. In certain specific passages, the constant, intensely self-​referential character of poetry as such, and even more broadly of language in general, is not only operative but is brought more or less directly to the surface thematically. Canto XXIII begins with one such passage that invites us to more general contemplation of the lyricism of the Paradiso. Its mother bird simile is, in some respects, the most revealing image of any in the Commedia concerning the specific capacities of the lyrical. These capacities turn on a self-​reflexive opening to the Other that reaches beyond the grasp of any possible concept. The Other is imagined (or at least alluded to) as “God” and therewith as the source of all reality. This Other can be related to also, in a negative way, as the Whole: since it is unlimited, it opens an unlimited relation to the Source of All. We have already seen how a bird image functions as a conventional emblem for lyrical song, or even for the poet himself, in Dante’s medieval tradition, notably with Bernart de Ventadorn and still in modern tradition as represented by Percy Shelley. Already in the case of Dante’s lark, the bird is rapt in silent watching. It is not, like Keats’s nightingale, engaged in pouring forth its song in “full-​throated ease” (“Ode to a Nightingale”). The skylark in Paradiso XIX was said, instead, to “grow silently content” (“tace contento”). Dante’s treatment of the topos already with his skylark emphasizes rather the negation of song. And again, with the mother bird in Canto XXIII, Dante focuses on the moment of silent contemplation. However, now this moment comes before any activity such as that of singing:     Come l’augello, intra l’amate fronde,      posato al nido de’ suoi dolci nati      la notte che le cose ci nasconde,     che, per veder li aspetti disiati      e per trovar lo cibo onde li pasca,      in che gravi labor li sono aggrati,

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The Mother Bird’s Vigil  71     previene il tempo in su l’aperta frasca,      e con ardente affetto il sole aspetta,      fiso guardando pur che l’alba nasca;

             (XXIII.1–​ 9)

    (Like the bird, amidst the beloved foliage,      posted on the nest of its own sweet brood,      during the night that hides things from us,     who in order to see the longed-​for visages      and to find the food with which to feed them,      which makes its heavy labor welcome,     anticipates the time on the open branch      and with ardent affection awaits the sun,      fixedly looking, that the dawn be born;) In the first place, the affective charge of this “poetic” action—​or more precisely contemplation—​on the part of the mother bird is concentrated into her love for her fledglings.1 This affection even overlays the nest with “beloved fronds” (“l’amate fronde”). Poetry is a form of desire, and indeed without love (most immediately for language) there can be no lyric. The mother bird’s love for her offspring is described in stilnovistic terms (“aspetti disiati,” etc.) that eroticize the maternal.2 Guido Guinizzelli employed the bird image to define love in a manifesto poem—​“Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore, /​come l’ausello in selva a la verdura” (“Love always repairs to the gentle heart, /​like the bird to the greenary in the forest”)—​that is repeatedly quoted and echoed by Dante (Vita nuova XX.3; Convivio IV.20.7; Inferno V.100). This emblematic image also underscores, moreover, the way that poetry does its work in the dark—​in “the night that hides things from us”—​thus without full cognizance, unconsciously. This bird is cousin to blind Milton’s “wakeful bird” that “sings darkling, /​and in shadiest covert hid /​Tunes her nocturnal note” (Paradise Lost III.39–​41). The state described resembles that of someone becoming aware, but not yet fully, of something before the first thought about it comes. Dante articulates such experience in his ascent to the Heaven of the Sun: “I was not aware except as a man is aware, /​before the first thought, of its coming” (“non m’accors’io se non com’om s’accorge /​anzi ’l primo pensier, del suo venire,” X.34–​36). The pre-​conscious work in question is represented by the bird’s endeavor to “find” food with which to feed its young (“e per trovar lo cibo onde li pasca”), where the word “trovar” also evokes 1  The bird’s tender care for its young is constant in the wide range of classical texts on which the simile draws: Virgil’s Georgics I, 413–​14; II, 523; III, 178; IV, 514; Aeneid II, 138; IV, 33; VI, 271; Statius, Achelleide I, 215; Lactantius, De ave Phoenice  39–​42. 2  Cf. Rachel Jacoff, “Circular Melody,” California Lectura Dantis, Paradiso Canto XXIII. Manuscript.

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72 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language “trobar,” or the making of poetry—​also a kind of nourishment. This is the essential practice of Provençal lyric, but even more transparently, of the trouvère poetry in langue d’oeïl, which uses trover for finding or inventing. Brunetto Latini in Li livres dou Tresor calls invention (the first of the five operations of rhetoric) “trovement,” thus confirming the inner connection of finding and inventing in lyric. In this kind of work, the work of lyric, even the heaviest labor is pleasant (“in che gravi labor li sono aggrati”). Such work, furthermore, is a finding (“trovar”) and perhaps also an inventing or invenire in the literal (Latin) sense of “coming into.”3 Inspired poetry is, in a sense, both invented and “found.” Thus, it entails passivity or receptivity as much as activity. Yet, in either case, the waiting itself is satisfying, for this desire for something else is also a reward in its own right, as Dante explains with reference to his own imitation of Beatrice’s watchful, expectant attitude. This act on Dante’s part mirrors the disposition that has just been adumbrated through the simile of the bird: sì che, veggendola io sospesa e vaga,    fecimi qual è quei che disiando    altro vorria, e sperando s’appaga.

          (XXIII.13–​ 15)

(so that, seeing her suspended and in delight,    I made myself like one who desiring    would like something else, and is fulfilled with hoping.) Like the bird’s desire, Dante’s own desire, in the silence and immobility of a moment gathered in interior concentration of the soul stretching toward something mysteriously infinite and vague, satisfies itself with its own hoping. More than the dawn itself as an event in the external world, these verses capture and tremulously convey the interiority of the bird’s sentiment of waiting for dawn. They describe an attendere (waiting) rather than a vedere (seeing). The moment before vision that is supposed to fulfill the vigilant observer tends to supplant the vision itself and to become its own fulfillment. This is a feature essential to the character of lyric language. It must satisfy with its own sweetness, short-​circuiting (at least in a first instant) the reference to an extra-​linguistic object with its promise of satisfaction. This structure of a satisfaction immanent to language, which is mimetically figured by the attitude of the mother bird, is nevertheless turned

3  Lucia Lazzerini, Letteratura medievale in lingua d’oc (Modena: Mucchi, 2001) confirms that the word trobar is from tropus—​the fruit of inventio in a rhetorical sense, a composition that is “found” (“trovata”). She cites Guiraut Riquier equating “troubadours” with “inventores” (43).

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The Mother Bird’s Vigil  73 entirely toward what transcends it. Dante’s paradisiacal language is so oriented through an intensity of hope and expectant waiting. This intentionality directed toward what transcends it doubles back and intends also language itself in its sensuous plenitude—​yet self-​effacement before what it expects. Its constant attention to language itself makes Dante’s lyrical language wondrously alive and palpable. Lyric is language turned back upon itself, language in love with and fulfilled by itself. And yet it is this precisely by being a structure of open expectation of fulfillment. It is an anticipation of sense, which itself makes sense and becomes a kind of virtual or second-​order referentiality, a type of referral to something beyond what can be said or delivered in words. The dynamism of self-​reflexive form alone produces such sense as ever novel—​because ever open—​meaning. The self-​reflexive closure of lyric is provisional and harbors in itself also the greatest evocation of something beyond language, something so other to language—​taken as a positively perceptible and intellectually understandable phenomenon—​as not even to be properly describable as a “referent.” The absolutely indescribable is what Dante’s language, which is lyrical in its core, conspires to intimate. Theologically, this ineffability, which is evoked by language most powerfully in its lyrical, self-​ reflexive self-​relatedness, is construed as being about God. In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante assimilates the ideal language, his vulgare illustre, to a superlatively simple substance and thus to God (“sicut simplicissima substantiarum, que Deus est,” I.xvi.5), who is ineffable by virtue of being non-​composite. In Paradiso, Dante still uses the concept “Dio,” even though the logic of his project, as a kind of negative theology in poetry, undermines this concept’s ability to signify in any way that is not metaphorical, not based on something other than what words can properly mean. The language of the Paradiso—​ emblematically that used in the representation of its birds and their singing—​exhibits a structure of self-​ referentiality striving to reveal itself in its ungraspable otherness through the prismatic (sur)faces of its appearances. This striving is, after all, its “real presence” as a “true substance.” The presence in question here must be understood as a spiritual presence discerned by spiritual senses.4 The lark in Canto XX symbolizes one conspicuous instance of such perception. Another is imaged in the simile of the mother bird that opens Canto XXIII. Both deal with the way that language—​through the desire it embodies—​attempts to transcend time and gain access to its origin. The lark is suspended in a moment of contemplative silence that repeats its 4  The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, ed. Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), surveys source texts from patristic to contemporary times, including a vast literature of medieval exegesis and theology on the spiritual senses employed by the “mind” and “heart” beyond all physical organs.

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74 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language own creation in God’s eternal good-​pleasure. The mother bird is poised on a threshold before the dawn of day—​an eternal day beyond all temporal measures. The mother bird represents a state suspended between waiting (“attendere”) and seeing (“vedere”). To this extent, she is also an allegory of faith understood as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen (“fede è sostanza di cose sperate /​e argomento de le non parventi,” XXIV.64–​65), according to Dante’s definition following Hebrews 11:1. Dante’s lyric poetics, in this regard, is a poetics of faith. The waiting itself, in this case, becomes a seeing that fills and satisfies desire with desire itself. This enacts the typical structure of Christian time as anticipating and realizing a future end—​the eschaton—​in the present. The parousia of the futural Second Coming is experienced here and now in the time of grace or kairos. The Resurrection of Christ is already the beginning or “firstfruits” of the event of the end, the inauguration of the end-​time, as Saint Paul so wonderously announces in I Corinthians 15:20–​24. Authentic Christianity is lived most intensely in just such a dimension of anticipation.5

Lyrical Self-​Reflexiveness as Foretaste of Paradise Lyric transcends the constraints of ordinary and fallen time by creating a time of its own—​in effect, by recreating (or repeating) the time of Creation. Dante suggests this even at the very outset of the Commedia, where he aligns the time of his poetic journey with the time “when the divine love first moved those beautiful things” (“quando l’amor divino /​ mosse di prima quelle cose belle,” Inferno I.39–​40). Creation is cosmic and poetic at the same time. This conjunction is rendered in miniature also in the lyric image of the mother bird with which Paradiso XXIII begins. She awaits the dawn with ardent affection—​in effect, anticipating the origin of time, before (or beyond) all time, by her fixed concentration. She enacts a transcending of time by becoming conscious of time so intensely as to accede to consciousness of that which in a manner precedes time and founds it—​namely, eternity. Her projection from desire “prevents,” or etymologically “comes before,” time (“previene il tempo”). 5 Giorgio Agamben, La chiesa e il regno (Rome: Nottetempo, 2010), trans. Leland de la Durantaye as The Church and the Kingdom (Calcutta: Seagull, 2012), offers a contemporary reflection on these classical Christian motifs, which are expounded by Oscar Cullmann, Christus und die Zeit: Die urchristliche Zeit-​und Geschichtsauffassung (Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1946), trans. Floyd V.  Filson as Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964). In Part III, we will examine how Agamben grafts this time of eschatological anticipation on to the time of the poem. The mutual implication of theology and secular, self-​reflexive thought in orienting us beyond present time to the transcendent is subtly demonstrated by Ingolf U.  Dalferth, Transzendenz und säkulare Welt: Lebensorientierung an lezter Gegenwart (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015).

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The Mother Bird’s Vigil  75 Her silent vigil takes place in and as a disclosure “on the open branch” (“in su l’aperta frasca”) over against “the night which hides things from us” (“la notte che le cose ci nasconde”). This ontological language of disclosure of things picks up the hint of the skylark simile, where lyric rapture empowers everything “to become what it is.” The potential inherent in such ontological language in Western tradition is brought powerfully to the fore by Heidegger’s exegesis of the Greek sources in which “truth” as disclosure is elucidated by the sense of a-​letheia as “coming out of hiding.”6 For the poet, this disclosedness in the moment before speech gathers all in the opening of language. This opening is as yet unexpressed, or still unarticulated. Perched at the opening of daybreak and of the disclosure of things in their pristine, paradisiacal truth, the mother bird profiles Dante’s own attitude as a waiting to be fed by the disclosures of Beatrice. This structural homology can be extended one step further to Dante’s function as poet feeding his readers. Language is present here negatively as the moment before speech, or as the moment that prepares for nurturing infants—​literally in-​fans, those who are as yet “without speech.” The mother bird’s vigilance is exercised in the interest of being able to feed her nestlings—​a feeding which, figuratively, mixes with the making of poetry, as again in the “sweetest and richest” maternal “milk” of the Muses a few lines later (“latte lor dolcissimo più pingue,” XXIII.57). Still later in the canto, Dante figures himself as like a baby (“fantolin”) whose “speech” is simply to stretch out its arms toward the mother who feeds it (XXIII.121–​23). Gary Cestaro has demonstrated how the maternal, nurturing breast figures as a fundamental motif in the poem and throughout Dante’s oeuvre as a whole.7 The maternal breast is an image for the source of love and nourishment, and through the figures of the mother-​bird and the songbird this nourishment motif is also connected specifically with the lyric and with self-​reflexivity as the generating source or matrix—​a kind of mother of all things. Closely connected with the self-​reflexivity of song and its creative power to open time and disclose beings in their truth and wholeness is the ability to create substance, a power that belongs to divinity alone. This power, however, can be imitated and repeated at an intellectual level by the human, creative, poetic spirit, and it is imaged in the animal world by mother love. The suspense of desire in which the mother bird abides is a state of vigilance without anxiousness, a satisfied waiting. The subtext about feeding with poetry, or with lyrical language, is worked into the 6 Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth” (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, 1930). See further section 58. 7  Gary P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).

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76 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language vocabulary of the description: “and to find food with which to feed them” (“e per trovar lo cibo onde li pasca”), as already suggested, might evoke the poetry-​making or the “trobar” (“to find”) of the Troubadours. The naturally ardent affectivity in the keen vigil of the bird awaiting the sun evokes allegorically the contemplation of God. In a long-​ standing Platonic tradition—​rehearsed in Convivio III.xii.7—​the sun represents the supreme principle of the Good and therewith the source of all being. The image here is of a desire that is satisfied by its own activity of waiting. The bird-​like Beatrice, for whose comportment the bird’s attitude is a simile, is delightfully in suspense (“sospesa e vaga”), and so is Dante. As he looks at her, she makes him like one who is filled, even fulfilled, just by the hope of fulfillment, as we can now more deeply appreciate in these previously registered verses: sì che, veggendola io sospesa e vaga,    fecimi qual è quei che disiando    altro vorria, e sperando s’appaga.

          (XXIII.12–​ 15)

(so that, seeing her suspended and in delight,    I made myself like one who in desiring    longs for more, and in hoping finds fulfillment.) Through the stretching out in time of the mother bird’s waiting for dawn, Dante describes the synthesis and the “staying” of time, or its contraction, through which it becomes something lasting and therewith a prescient image of eternity. He describes a hungering for something other (“altro vorria”) that is at the same time a being filled by desire itself, just as he, among the delicacies offered him in the heaven (“quelle dape,” 43), actually has the experience of transcending himself—​of being larger than he otherwise would be and of exiting from himself: la mente mia così, tra quelle dape    fatta più grande, di sé stessa uscìo … .

            (XXIII.43–​ 44)

(my mind thus among those delicacies    made larger, exited from itself … .) The desire that expresses itself self-​reflexively in poetry feeds on itself. Its very waiting becomes its own fulfillment, for, as desiring incarnate in language, it is fulfilled in the very language that expresses this desire. Poetic making has this creative power to project a structure of waiting and desiring that satisfies in and of itself—​self-​reflexively. This simile

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The Mother Bird’s Vigil  77 enacts in miniature what Dante’s whole paradoxical poem of the ineffable is doing on an epic scale. This mode of generative and self-​fulfilling self-​reflection began to be highlighted in the Earthly Paradise at the height of the Purgatorio. When Dante looks into Beatrice’s eyes and sees reflected there the gryphon’s (and Christ’s) two natures, this “idolo” satisfies his soul even in making it thirst always for more (“saziando di sé, di sé asseta,” Purgatorio XXXI.129). This divine reflection of the human ideal draws the self endlessly beyond itself (as in Gregory of Nyssa’s epektasis), thereby redeeming the idolatry inherent in self-​love. In fact, “desire which anticipates” is a good description of Dante’s Paradiso as a whole in its attempt to give a foretaste of heaven. The traditional threefold division of poetic genres into epic, drama, and lyric mirrors the division of time into the three tenses: past (epic), present (drama), and future (lyric).8 Although lyric has often been associated with nostalgic, typically melancholic rememoration of the past, Dante teaches us to appreciate lyric equally as future-​oriented, as an anticipation of Paradise. Its sense as a genre is captured best as the foretaste of what we desire to enjoy unendingly—​beyond our present in the time that consumes us.

Lyric Self-​Reflection and the Creation of Time Let us dwell for a moment longer (like the bird) on these rich nourishments. They require some time to digest. This lyric elaboration, for which the bird is a symbol, anticipates time (“previene il tempo”) during the night by reaching back into an open region—​concentrated on the “open branch” (“aperta frasca”)—​of creativity where all things exist as emergent in the origin of their being. This moment before time—​ before the time of day and of ontological differentiation—​is sustained in affection (“ardente affetto”) and in expectation of the rising sun (“il sole aspetta”) as the Source of life and energy and, in Platonic symbology, of being itself. These interior states, where time is first projected, cannot be properly reckoned in terms of chronological or chronometric time as we know it in an already formed, phenomenal world. They are represented, consequently, as having something of the changelessness of eternity, as suggested by the bird’s fixedly gazing in search of the break of day, literally the “birthing” of dawn (“fiso guardando pur che l’alba nasca”). Dante will require the same fixed gazing for his final vision (“mirava fissa, immobile e attenta,” XXXIII.98). It is not, of course, the case that an historical individual can definitively escape time through withdrawing

8 Emil Staiger, “Lyrik und lyrisch,” in Zur Lyrik-​Diskussion, ed. Reinhold Grimm (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966), 75–​82.

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78 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language into inner experience, but neither is this inner dimension of time-​synthesis calculable in terms of any outwardly perceptible or worldly type of time.9 As Dante says of Beatrice, when they ascend together to the Heaven of the Sun, her act of leading him from good to better does not “stick out in time” (“l’atto suo per tempo non si sporge”). In other words, her act in ascending the heavens is so rapid that it takes no span of time: È Beatrice quella che sì scorge    di bene in meglio, sì subitamente    che l’atto suo per tempo non si sporge

        (X.37–​ 39)

(It is Beatrice who guides from    good to better, and so suddenly    that her act is not extended in time.) Dante’s poetic journey into the sun (in the fourth heaven) takes him beyond solar measures of time. He enters into a dimension of time as prescience and pregnancy. Three heavens later and higher, Dante invents the word “s’inventre” (“enwombs itself” or “makes pregnant with itself”), using his typical reflexive verbalizing of nouns (as also in “s’impola,” XXII.67; “s’infiora,” XIV.13; “s’inzaffira,” XXIII.102, etc.) to suggest a self-​reflexive bringing to birth of blessedness. The action and emotion of the lyric happen in a certain sense outside of time, for they take place before the assignation of sense or meaning in terms of external objects. The “lived time” of lyric—​temps vécu in Henri Bergson’s vocabulary10—​is immune to objective time as measured in the external world. Lyric forms time into a meaningful shape of its own making. The lyric substitutes a satisfaction immanent to language for the fulfillment that ordinarily comes from some extralinguistic object or event that is referred to or indicated. The lyric thereby takes into its own creative shaping or making the temporality of experience. No longer waiting for time to happen, that is, for the “awaited” to come in its own time, the lyric institutes a temporality of immediacy, in which it is already its own fulfillment, even while at the same time remaining suspended in anticipation toward a future fruition of a Paradise to come.

9 Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness (Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, 1928)  demonstrates this in a probing examination of these transcendental structures of our consciousness of time. 10 Bergon’s L’évolution creátrice (Paris: Alcan, 1928), 1–​8, expounds lived time as “duration” (“la durée”). In The Creative Mind (La Pensée et le mouvant, 1946), Bergson theorizes pure perception of time by intuition as freeing subjective, lived time from normal, objective constraints.

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The Mother Bird’s Vigil  79 The lyric, with its circularity of self-​reflection or return to the same, models how language generates time. Time requires a self-​reflective structure of closure—​of some moment, some span of time, being “over” and gathered into a completed whole. Passage of time can be apprehended only from within a certain framework of stability joining beginning and end. And yet such a fixed framework, in effect, annuls time in its openness as essentially free flow. Self-​reflexivity, taken as an ideal structure, on the one hand, closes the circuit of self-​identity but, on the other hand, taken as an existential act, opens infinitely into the Open. Any emergence of self into identity through reflection is (un)grounded upon such an open abyss.11 This is also the structure that we found to be coded into the traditional teaching of the Christian Trinity, with its mysterious recess in the Father, its revelation through the Word, and its issuing in the procession of the Spirit. In the Paradiso, language, through the synthetic unity of syntax drawing separate elements into a sentence, points to what is, in effect, eternity. Augustine works this analogy out elaborately in his Confessions (IV.x and XI.vi–​vii), where the eternity of God’s Word is compared to the meaning of a complete sentence that is realized in time only through the temporal vanishing of each component word and syllable. For Dante, writing in the Paradiso inhabits the threshold between time and eternity because it encompasses all that can be said and so be, even while remaining unencompassable in its own being, since it is an ongoing, ever-​ open creating. What language can do is reflect on itself, but in doing so, it is not essentially an object. Self-​reflection on its own creative act opens rather into an abyss that cannot properly be represented. Nevertheless, the experience of this “abyss” can be figured. Self-​reflexive figurings can round this emptiness out into thought or sensations that are very real for us.12 Self-​reflexivity of lyric language, accordingly, exposes the intersection of time and eternity. Lyric self-​reflexivity reflects the point where the Trinity (as an eternal relation within the Godhead outside of time) and the Incarnation (as the eternal Godhead entering into time and renewing history) fit together. The dovetailing of these two theological mysteries is the final note on which the Paradiso ends—​or rather the synthesis toward which it yearns all along in the very texture of its lyrical tercets. The Divine Comedy, through its circles of lyric self-​enclosure, ensconsed in linear narrative leading up to apocalypse, embodies the original transcending of time that makes time possible as a perceptible, intelligible phenomenon and a significant history. 11 This point will be amplified and nuanced in Part IV, section 51, by reference to Agamben’s discussion of “The End of the Poem” (“La fine del poema”). 12  Karlheinz Stierle, Zeit und Werk: Prousts À la recherche du temps perdu und Dantes Commedia (Munich: Hanser, 2008)  analyzes the poetic work, medieval (Dante) to modern (Proust), as giving eternity a sensible shape in time.

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11  Ineffability in the Round—​and its Breakthrough

Canto XXIII, with its mother bird, is a key canto also for the ineffability topos—​and not just by accident. It anticipates the Empyrean by granting Dante vision of the whole cohort, metaphorically “all the fruit” (“tutto ’l frutto,” XXIII.20), of the blessed, the Church Triumphant together with Christ himself, whose shining substance (“lucente sustanza,” 32), like the sun, is not sustainable to Dante’s eyes. Robert Hollander describes this as “a liminal space, at the border of the infinite” and discerns here “the direct presence of Eternity,” as in the Empyrean two heavens later.1 Hence the “jump” of Dante’s “sacred poem” in “figuring Paradise” (“figurando il Paradiso /​convien saltar lo sacrato poema,” XXIII.61–​ 62). Dante addresses here in some unprecedented ways the breakthrough to eternity, yet he does so precisely through circling reflexivities. Paradoxically, the circle of self-​reflection becomes Dante’s means of reaching out beyond self toward the absolutely other. Concretely, this means experiencing in and through the porousness of the self. Paradiso XXIII features the triumph of Maria celebrated by the angel Gabriel descending like a torch formed as a circle shaped into a crown to fête her (“formata in cerchio a guisa di corona,” 95). The angelic “torch” (“facella”) descends through heaven (“per entro il cielo”) to encircle Mary (“cinsela”) and self-​reflexively “turns itself around her” (“girossi intorno ad ella,” XXIII.95–​96). Thus “the circulated melody” closes upon or “seals itself” (“Così la circulata melodia /​si sigillava,” 109–​10). This self-​enclosed circularity creates a completeness and plenitude that propagates itself with a generative power reaching beyond itself by issuing in further creation and salvation. This is the nature of God as imitated in structures of self-​fulfilling fullness that become creative. In God’s image, individual selves in turn reach out over their own boundaries in relating to others. Like infants reaching their arms up to their “mamma” once they have taken their milk, so the flames of the souls that have descended from the Empyrean stretch upward with their flaming tips (“ciascun di quei candor in sù si stese /​con la sua cima”)

1  Robert Hollander, ed., Paradiso (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 574.

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Ineffability in the Round  81 showing outwardly their “deep [or high] affection” (“alto affetto”) for Mary (XXIII.124–​26). Divine agape is the model for this expansive dynamic of love. The voice and singing light identifies itself by first-​person reference as speech of the “angelic love” that circles around the exalted delight emanating from the virgin womb, where the Lord was lodged. This womb harbors the object of desire of all souls in the redeemed world of Paradise: Io sono amore angelico, che giro    l’alta letizia che spira del ventre    che fu albergo del nostro disiro;

        (XXIII.103–​ 5)

(I am the angelic love, that circles    the high happiness that breathes from the womb    that lodged the object of our desire.) Canto XXIII offers lyric images of the triumphs of Christ and Mary—​ a Garden under the ray of the sun (“raggio di sol,” 79). Both glorious visions descend from above and then withdraw again back into the higher heavens. They leave a void in their wake, but they have engendered a powerful affect by their apparition—​ love drawn on by the vacuum. Christ is the Word incarnate in images—​eminently the “rose,” in which he became flesh—​and redolent in the lilies that disseminate his words and works: Quivi è la rosa in che ’l verbo divino    carne si fece; quivi son li gigli    al cui odor si prese il buon camino

           (XXIII.73–​ 75)

(Here is the rose in which the divine Word    became flesh; here are the lilies    by whose odor the right path is taken) In these images, the divine becomes sensuous. Spirit is dispensed as a sweet fragrance. Dante’s technique of self-​ reflection illustrates the means by which human beings are able to imitate God, who is one and who reflects himself—​and only himself—​in all reality. This movement is modeled, above all, by lyric language as a melody that circles upon itself (“la circulata melodia,” XXIII.109). By imitating God in self-​ reflection, humans transcend themselves and are drawn closer to the template in whose image they are made. This lift upward toward transcendence marks the fertility of contemplation, as articulated by San Pier Damiani

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82 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language in lines (“Luce divina sopra me s’appunta,” etc., XXI.83–​87) replete with womb imagery that were quoted in the last subsection of the Introduction as encapsulating the Paradiso’s underlying dynamic of transcendence through self-​reflection. What an extraordinary fiction Dante has created of himself rising through the degrees of paradisiacal blessedness to the vision of God by contemplating the beauty of his ladylove, alias theological revelation. The fruitfulness of contemplation is a fruitfulness of self-​reflection—​an exercise of perfecting one’s own image, a reflection that is emphatically fecund. The heaven of the contemplatives stresses how Pier Damiani’s “contemplative thoughts” (“pensieri contemplativi,” XXI.117) have filled this heaven with saints in a most fertile manner (“fertilemente,” 119). This spiritual fecundity of contemplation is a further realization of the pattern of self-​reflection that issues in an orientation to the Other. It produces holy fruits and flowers (XXII.48) by heat and gel, by devoted ardor and strict discipline. Dante himself dilates like a rose in its full “potency” (“possanza”) under the sun (55–​57). Contemplation involves a withdrawal from the outside world and a reflexive concentration inward—​but therewith a redoubling of (erotically charged) energy that opens outward and transcends upward. Christ, as incarnate object of desire, brings to earth “the truth that so exalts [or sublates] us” (“la verità che tanto ci soblima,” XXII.42). Contemplation, so understood, repeats the pattern previously outlined concerning lyric and its reflexivity. Lyric, in its circularity, drives toward an ineffable wholeness of self, but also spirals in self-​ transcendence toward an Other. Throughout the canticle, circles of self-​reflection break open—​outward and upward. They serve to open the way toward the absolutely Other. They enable Dante to break ground toward his ultimate (Un)Ground. At the outset of Canto XII, Dante describes the circling of the wise spirits as the wheeling of a holy millstone (“santa mola”). This ring is itself encircled by another, thereby forming twin concentric rainbows. Dante specifies that the outer one is born from the inner    like the speech of the nymph    whom love consumed as the sun does vapors. (nascendo di quel d’entro quel di fori,    a guisa del parlar di quella vaga    ch’amor consunse come sol vapori.)

           (XII.13–​ 15)

Echo’s reflective presence operates to metamorphose the Narcissus myth from a story of self-​loss into a mystic apotheosis of self-​reflection refracted toward transcendence. The nymph is subsumed into the

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Ineffability in the Round  83 triumphant fest of the second garland or corona of dancing and singing souls in the Heaven of the Sun that engenders yet a third at the beginning of Canto XIV. This third ring is hailed as the true sparking of the Holy Spirit (“Oh vero sfavillar del Santo Spiro,” XIV.76), forming into a circle again radiating from transcendent divinity.

Circles of (Self-​)Reflection from the Core of Creation to the Trinitarian Godhead The Paradiso thus thematizes its self-​reflexive structures in ricocheting and reverberating forms, including the form of the circle conceived as a perpetual return upon itself.2 This return veers beyond itself narrowly considered by reaching toward its transcendent point of origin. The circling self-​reflexiveness of language, as evoking a transcendent origin or destiny in silence, is itself a reflection of the self-​reflection of the Father in the Son. Their relation of exemplary self-​giving is echoed and reflected in turn by the procession of the Spirit. The underlying pattern is that of Neoplatonic emanation from and return to origin in the (ineffable) One beyond Being: processus and reditus (πρόοδος and ἐπιστροφή in the Greek sources). Paradise itself is structured circularly, indeed as a series of concentric spheres, through which Dante’s motion is correspondingly circular—​ or rather spiraling. As such, self-​ reflexivity reaches far beyond the scope of a mere method or technique. It embodies the most general structures of cosmos and Creation, and therewith God’s own artistic “technique,” which the poem imitates. Self-​reflection captures something even of the Creator himself, since the Son—​the Creator Word and perfect image of the Father—​is reflected throughout the Creation. Not only locomotion in the heavenly spheres, but the very shape of knowledge, moreover, is circular inasmuch as it is encyclopedic.3 Knowledge, or its quest, is the internal motor and vehicle of the voyage through Paradise. The circle is one particularly apt and well-​recognized figure for what, at bottom, is a logic of self-​reflexivity. Roger Dragonetti points out in an essay on “The Sense of the Circle and the Poet” that “for Dante rhythmic movement is a perpetual analogical radiating of the same” (“pour Dante, le mouvement rhythmique est un perpétuel rayonnement analogique du même”).4 The very vowels of language—​AEIOU—​that,

2  For broad consideration of the intellectual significance of the circle, see Georges Poulet, Les metamorphoses du circle, excerpted as “The Metamorphoses of the Circle,” in John Freccero, ed., Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-​ Hall, 1965), 151–​69. 3  The circular shape of knowledge and encyclopedias is explored by Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)  and Zygmunt Barański, “Dante e le epistemologie medievali,” Dante e i segni: Saggi per una storia intellettuale di Dante Alighieri (Naples: Liguori, 2000). 4  Roger Dragonetti, “Le sens du cercle et le poète,” Romanica Gandensia 9 (1961): 90.

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84 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language according to Convivio IV.vi.4, form a ring (“si rivolve e torna”) and tie (“figura di legame”) speech together in a circle (“nell’O”), imitate analogically the repeated return to the same. As this circle of vowel sounds suggests, Paradiso brings its circular forms to realization not only in its overarching structure and theme of the return of the soul to its true home, but also in the microstructure of its versification, in its syllabification and vocalization—​or, in other words, in the lyrical quality and texture of its language. However, it needs not to be forgotten that this return to the same is also a breaking out toward the absolutely other, that is, the Unknowable. The circle back to self entails also an infinite deepening, a turning to or spiraling into an abyss. The risk of falling into the trap of Narcissus—​of a reductive and deadly circularity—​is held in check and is countered, figuratively, by the circle’s being broken open into a chiasmus. A chiasmus forms a sort of cross—​like chi (X), the twenty-​second letter of the Greek alphabet. There is a cross lurking in the midst of Dante’s circles, which consistently open into some form of chiasmus. His return to himself is not an unbroken upward spiralling flight, but is rather crossed by every imaginable adversity, beginning with his downward descent into the depths of negativity in the Inferno. In the end, the whole poem contrives to cross itself out (X) by the silence of ineffability.

The Broken-​Open Circle or Chiasmus The chiasmus is itself a sort of broken-​open circle in its abba movement circling round to the term from which it began. Carefully considered, “chiasmus is a figure which mimes circularity.”5 One of Dante’s most striking employments of the chiasmus—​at the opening of Canto XIV—​ explicitly thematizes this circular movement: Dal centro al cerchio, e sì dal cerchio al centro … . (From center to circle, and so from circle to center … .) A few lines into the canto, a numerical version of the same chiasmic structure of reversal or inversion in order to return upon itself to its beginning follows: Quell’uno e due e tre che sempre vive    e regna sempre in tre e in due e ’n uno … .

            (XIV.28–​ 29)

5  Rachel Jacoff, “ ‘Shadowy Prefaces’: An Introduction to Paradiso,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 208–​25. Citation, 214.

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Ineffability in the Round  85 (That one and two and three that always lives    and reigns always as three and two and one … .) In this canto, with its climactic celebration in anticipation of the return of the blessed to their resurrected bodies, the chiasmus describes a circling back to its starting point. However, at the same time, it is also a cross-​ structure: the vertical axis is cut or crossed by a horizontal axis. Such a crossing is suggested even by the shape of the initial letter chi—​X—​in the word “chiasmus” in Greek. Among Christian writers, furthermore, the chiasmus receives a particular sanction from the figure of Christ, whose name, Χριστός, also begins with this letter. By his Cross (also a X shape rotated 90 degrees), moreover, Christ restores the world to its pristine perfection. The verse quoted above from Paradiso XIV.76 (“Oh vero sfavillar del Santo Spiro”) nearly concludes the Heaven of the Sun and segues to the introduction to the Heaven of Mars, the heaven of martyrs, where Dante meets Cacciaguida and other holy warriors who sacrificed themselves for their faith in Christ. The Cross of Christ is on display there as the central emblem of the heaven—​a luminous Greek cross (delineating four equal quadrants), in which the soul-​lights gloriously scintillate, highlighting those who died as martyrs in the East in the Holy Land. This canto’s technique, along with its theme of martyrdom, is thus placed under the self-​ reflecting sign of the chiasmus, in which the circularity of self-​reflection opens up infinitely, with its arms spreading outward to what is outside and other with no limit, no outer bound. The divine self-​reflexivity inscribed in the cross-​chiasmus is constantly harped on as the very condition of divine engendering and creativity. The Cross was understood as having a power of regenerating humanity by healing it from Original Sin. The wood of the Cross was traditionally deemed a splinter from the Tree of Life in Eden, which symbolizes Paradise itself (and finally the kingdom of the redeemed), as the “tree” that “lives from its summit” (“l’albero che vive de la cima,” XVIII.29). Dante stages this Tree’s reflowering in Purgatorio XXXII.59–​60, where creation is renewed through it.6 Like the topography of Dante’s Paradise, the temporality of redemption is circular.

6  Marjorie Reeves and Beatrice Hirsch-​Reich, “Joachim’s Figurae and Dante’s Symbolism,” The Figurae of Joachim of Fiore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 317–​23, interpret this figure in an apocalyptic key.

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12  The Substance of Creation as Divine Self-​Reflection

As Dante’s typically ritual circumlocutions intimate, the Trinitarian structure of the Deity is intrinsically self-​reflective. The second divine Person is the perfect image of the first, while the third reflects the love between them. God has revealed Godself in and as nothing but perfect self-​reflection. Dante’s poetry does not fail to highlight this in its incessant invocations of the Christian divinity. The self-​possession of divinity, its dwelling within no other than itself (“sola in te sidi”), its being both sole subject and sole object of its own intellection (“sola t’intende, e da te intelletta /​e intendente”), produces an equally self-​reflexive self-​affection (“te ami e arridi,” XXXIII.124–​26). These features bring the paradigm of self-​reflexivity to climactic expression in the final canto. Dante’s final vision of the Trinitarian Deity appearing as three circles of different color, but of the same measure, is presented through the metaphor of a rainbow and its reflection in a second, and then of the reflection of the two together in a third: Ne la profonda e chiara sussistenza    de l’alto lume parvermi tre giri    di tre colori e d’una contenenza; e l’un da l’altro come iri da iri    parea reflesso, e ’l terzo parea foco    che quinci e quindi igualmente si spiri.

          (XXXIII.115–​ 20)

(In the deep and clear substance    of the profound light three circles appeared to me    of three colors and one measure and one appeared to be the reflection of the other    like rainbow from rainbow, and the third appeared fire    that from the one and other was breathed forth equally.) The self-​reflexive structure of divinity is mimed here in language metaphorically transposing the Nicene Creed and its definition of the Trinity

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Creation as Divine Self-Reflection  87 into imagery and language of reflected rainbows. Of course, the three mutually reflecting circles repeat the pattern already rehearsed from XIV.67–​ 78, where the Holy Spirit (“Santo Spiro”) scintillates in the Heaven of the Sun. And the last line echoes verbatim X.2, quoted at the outset of Part I. Inscribed into this divine circling of “reflected light” (“lume reflesso”), the final vision of the Incarnation or of “our effigy” (“nostra effige,” XXXIII.131) is, in effect, Dante’s seeing himself reflected in Christ. To see himself reflected in God is his journey’s goal defined in inescapably relational and self-​reflective terms. Dante’s description in XXX, upon entering the Empyrean, of the light representing God in visible form is the direct predecessor of the final vision in XXXIII. This light is structured on the same motif of circularity (“si distende in circular figura”) that appears by virtue of self-​reflexivity (“tutta sua parvenza /​reflesso”), as is made clear by the immediately following verses: “Lume è là sù che visibile face    lo creatore a quella creatura    che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace. E’ si distende in circular figura,    in tanto che la sua circunferenza    sarebbe al sol troppo larga cintura. Fassi di raggio tutta sua parvenza    reflesso al sommo del mobile primo,    che prende quindi vivere e potenza.”

          (XXX.100–​ 108)

(“A light is up there that makes visible    the Creator to that creature which    has its peace alone in seeing him. It extends itself in a circular figure,    so much that its circumference    would be too large a girdle for the sun. Its whole appearance makes itself a ray    reflected at the top of the Primum Mobile,    which thence derives life and power.”) God becomes visible only as reflected on the outer and upper rim of the Primum Mobile. God makes himself visible in this way, even though nothing in the created universe, by its own nature, can be a reflection of him. The divine light makes the Creator visible to the creature. Free creatures (angels and blessed souls) see God in this light, but they see this light as a ray reflected in and thereby vivifying the material universe from its highest part. This condition of self-​reflexivity of the divinity reflected in the light of Creation is repeatedly alluded to in the imagery of reflection and

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88 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language mirroring—​and even of reading—​in God that pervades the whole cantica. Dante sees himself, together with all of the saved, as reflected in the divine Light. Conversely, God sees himself reflected in the celestial rose. This encompassing embrace of opposites, of divinity and humanity, is brought about miraculously within the narcissistic structure of self-​ reflection. Dante drinks in the light with his eyelids in order that his eyes may become “better mirrors” to reflect the Empyrean, which is itself made to appear by the ray reflected from the surface of the Primum mobile (XXX.85–​90).1 The language of reflexivity is unceasing from beginning to end of the poem. God himself is imagined as a reflective medium in guises such as a true mirror (“verace speglio,” XXVI.106) or a book (“volume,” XXVIII.14, XXXIII.86) in which all things can be reflected. Cacciaguida also characterizes the Deity as the great volume (“magno volume”) and the mirror (“speglio”) in which Dante’s thoughts are displayed to all the blessed even before he thinks them (XV.49–​63). In just this manner, the One is “mirrored” in the angelic orders, the “nine substances” (“quasi specchiato, in nove sussistenze,” XIII.59). Creation is a radiating of the resplendence of the idea of our Sire (XIII.52–​54). Even so, this living Light or Love “remains eternally one with itself” (“etternalmente rimanendosi una,” XIII.60), in effect, the “One,” the “most simple of substances,” by which all things are measured, according to De vulgari eloquentia I.xvi.2–​5. Dante sees the angelic hierarchies as concentric circles around a point of light reflected in Beatrice’s eyes like a flame in a mirror (“come in lo specchio fiamma di doppiero,” XXVIII.4). As already in the third canto, he turns to see whether these reflected images tell him the truth (“e sé rivolge per veder se ’l vetro /​li dice il vero,” 7–​8). This time, unlike in Canto IV, he does have to turn around to see the reality itself. Even so, the reality he sees is still a reflected image. The angelic hierarchies that he sees are a visible image reflected onto the surface of the Primum Mobile from the Empyrean, for in the Empyrean itself they are invisible. Furthermore, they erroneously appear to enclose the point by which they actually are enclosed (“parendo inchiuso da quel ch’elli ’nchiude,” XXX.12) in an archetypal inversion of reality by its representation. Dante turns to see this model of God and the angelic orders as reflected from the Empyrean through the Crystalline Sphere—​as reflected on the latter’s surface. And this time there is no error. Yet the difference is not really between images that are reflections and ones that are not. All images and all finite realities are but reflections of the reality of the Empyrean. God’s being or presence can be seen only as reflected in finite creatures. Angels and souls count in Aristotelian metaphysics as substances. Still, 1  Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 169, suggests that the curvature of Dante’s eyeballs becomes one with the Primum Mobile’s so as to reflect the Empyrean.

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Creation as Divine Self-Reflection  89 their substance is itself nothing but a reflection of divine being or substance. These created substances themselves can in turn be reflected in the more normal and literal sense of the word, as they are in Beatrice’s eyes and on the surface of the Primum Mobile. True realities as we know them even in the heavens and even in the Empyrean are, deeply considered, reflections of the only true reality in itself—​ the One whom Dante calls God. Ironically, in his reverse-​ narcissistic error, Dante was in a way right, after all. Whatever we love is loved self-​reflexively, although its reality is not the reflected self, but rather God as its ultimate Ground. Self-​reflection is a risk because only God can actually make things to be reflections of himself. Our own self-​ reflections, taken for themselves, are mere presumption. Nonetheless, it is through self-​reflection that we can come to resemble God and be restored to a semblance of his image. In order to relate to God as, in essence, wholly unknowable and inaccessible, we have no alternative but to relate self-​reflexively to ourselves. Such reflection is predicated not on positive knowledge of ourselves any more than of God’s nature as self-​reflexive, but rather on our recognition of our inability naturally to know what is radically other than us and yet is our Ground. We must recognize, in other words, our ignorance of our deeper selves. By recognizing this as our predicament, we are dissolving the self-​sufficient substantiality of the self. This self-​reflection cracks the self open to its “beyond.” To know our nullity is to open ourselves as (nothing but) a conduit to the All beyond us. One could understand this “beyond” as the “not-​All,” since it is apprehended not positively, but only as a negation of self. The All is not totalized and grasped in any finite shape or form. Morever, this apprehension entails not a fixed privileging of the Other over what is one’s own, but rather a recognition that, for a finite self, whatever is one’s own can flourish only in relation to its others. To see form in the Empyrean can only be an accommodation to Dante’s human limits via a poetic representation of the unrepresentable. The fact that Dante sees the blessed souls of the Empyrean in the flesh, in the “aspects” (“aspetti”) that they will really have only after the Last Judgment (XXX.44–​45), indicates that this vision is not fully an objective seeing. It is rendered possible poetically and self-​reflexively, by Dante’s gaze “re-​ circulating” (“ricirculando,” XXXI.48) freely, through the living light, up and down the rose. Likewise, the vision of the Empyrean itself is possible only as reflected off the surface of the first material heaven (the “maggior corpo,” XXX.39) that Dante and Beatrice leave in “entering” the Empyrean. Dante sees the blessed souls’ faces lit up and smiling with God’s light (“Vedëa visi a carità süadi, /​d’altrui lume fregiati e di suo riso,” XXXI.48–​49). He is seeing them in God—​and seeing God reflected in them. Thus he sees them in the white stoles (XXX.129) of their resurrected bodies, according to his hope expressed to St. James (XXV.91–​96), even before the Last Judgment and

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90 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language Resurrection. He sees them as a “convent” and a “city,” thus combining metaphors for their organized gathering. This does not mean that Dante is simply making this up, but rather that his seeing the souls in God is self-​reflexive, participative seeing. Seeing in God here coincides with a poetic seeing through lenses that focus the meaning of what Dante sees of divinity through analogous human experiences. What Dante sees throughout Paradise, after all, are reflected images in the deeper sense that everything that is anything at all is dependent on God. Whatever is is only to the degree that it reflects God’s true Being. All created reality, on this account, is nothing but a reflected image, a “resplendence” (“non è se non splendor,” XIII.53). As the medieval jingle goes, “Omnis mundi creatura /​quasi liber et figura /​nobis est et speculum” (“Every creature in the world /​is like a book and figure /​to us and a mirror”).2 In this metaphysical sense, empirical reality is but a reflection of God—​of God’s own self-​loving self-​reflection (XIII.52–​66). And true reality (God) is unseen. What Dante does see is real, as Beatrice informs him in III.30, yet not unconditionally, nor in itself. It is real, instead, always only with the proviso that it make manifest the reality that lies beyond manifest form. But to do this, it must disclose an ineluctable concealment as the shadow side of revelation itself.3 In other words, revelation makes all appearing manifest as non-​ultimate reality, and to this extent makes invisible reality “appear.”

Self-​Reflexivity as Trinitarian and Incarnational Self-​ reflexivity is the essential structure of divinity as revealed not only in the Trinity (section 4) but also in the Incarnation. Incarnation transforms the self-​ enclosure of self-​ reflection, opening it in self-​ exposure to a further dimension of relation to otherness. The Trinitarian God is Creator, by the Word—​and Sustainer, by the power of the Spirit. However, in the economy of salvation, the Creation exists, according to ancient theological arguments, for the sake of the Incarnation. The Incarnation represents an otherness, namely, humanity, with which divinity becomes one and in which divinity thus productively reflects its own self-​identity. In Convivio IV.xix and xxi, Dante stresses the phenomenal fecundity of embodied being. It confers on humans a productive capacity comprising a nobility exceeding that of angels (“nobilitade umana … quella dell’angelo soperchia,” IV.xix.6) and making man almost another incarnate God (“quasi sarebbe un altro Iddio incarnato,” IV.xxi.10). 2  Attributable to Alanus ab Insulis: https://​la.wikisource.org/​wiki/​Omnis_​mundi_​creatura Accessed 5/​15/​2017. 3  Andrew Hui, “Dante’s Book of Shadows: Ombra in the Divine Comedy,” Dante Studies 134 (2016): 195–​224 distinguishes six stages of the shadowing of Dante’s true vision, ending in the metaphors of his poetic text (218).

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Creation as Divine Self-Reflection  91 Dante encompasses this doctrine symbolically at the poem’s climax in a further description of the circle of divinity as a self-​engendering of “our effigy.” Even Dante’s phonetics circle obsessively around certain clicking sounds such as the hard consonants “q,” “c,” and “t” in the first tercet, making the self-​reflexive intensity of lyric materially audible: Quella circulazion che sì concetta   pareva in te come lume reflesso,    da li occhi miei alquanto circunspetta, dentro da sé, del suo colore stesso,    mi parve pinta de la nostra effige;    per che ’l mio viso in lei tutto era messo.

            (XXXIII.125–​ 32)

(That circling that so conceived    appeared in you as a reflected light,    for a while encompassed by my eyes, within itself, of its own color,    appeared to me painted with our effigy;    so that my vision was wholly set on it.) The “living light” that Dante contemplates thus reflected was introduced as a “simple semblance” (“semplice sembiante,” XXXIII.109), which alludes to the simplicity of God’s Being. In God, all attributes are identical with one another and indistinguishable from God’s being, so that God’s wisdom, power, goodness, being, and unity are only different names for his absolutely indivisible oneness. The divine Being is itself without difference or distinction and can be named in these various ways only relative to our limited experience and partial knowledge. Yet this simplicity must somehow appear, as the rhetoric of appearance (“parea”) or of semblance (“sembiante”) insists, and this condition brings God’s self-​ manifestation into the sphere of phantasmatic self-​reflection familiar to Narcissus. The self-​reflexivity in question here is not only the Trinitarian structure of divinity: it models also the structure of the human psyche and of language in its lyrical essence. This human image (“nostra effige”) is now a redeemed Narcissus. In sum, self-​ reflexivity works in Dante’s Paradiso as the structure through which divinity realizes itself at all levels: first, in its internal self-​ relation as a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; next, in the created order as a reflection of the divine nature and also as incarnate in the Savior; but further, and no less directly, in language itself, especially by virtue of its essentially lyrical structures of phonic and graphic repetition. Dante’s poem reveals divinity not only thematically by description and objective representation, but even more immediately and intimately in its language, in its linguistic and particularly its lyrical form. Lyrical

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92 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language language takes on theological significance as itself a revelation of divinity. This occurs both in the Trinitarian self-​reflexivity of this language and in its Incarnational manifestation of meaning in sensuous form. The self-​ reflection of the Father in the Son is further reflected outward toward all by the Son as Word in the act of Creation. The same divine self-​reflection is extended yet further by the Son as Christ in redemption and by the Holy Spirit as Love in the work of sanctification.

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13  Eclipse of Trinity and Incarnation as Models of Transcendence through Self-​Reflection

In Dante’s poetry, the theological doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation appear as inseparable and serve as paradigms that guide Dante’s invention of a lyrical poetics. They become practically the same doctrine turned toward different aspects of the revelation of the one God in the immediate reflexivity of poetic language. In straining toward theological transcendence, Dante develops both a poetics of self-​reflexivity of the Trinity and a poetics of thought becoming sensuous in the poetic word based on the model of the Word made flesh in the Incarnation. The inspiration of the Spirit is also crucial in Dante’s key formulations of his lyric poetics, notably in Purgatorio XXIV, where he emphasizes precisely the “inspiration” of Love (“quando Amor mi spira,” 53). But in order to fully appreciate Dante’s distinctive achievement, we must pay attention also to other values assigned to lyric language in medieval literature, values that counterpoint these theological significances. Lyric is also often considered to embody the vanity of language as employed by fallen human beings, who are thenceforth tainted in all their undertakings. Dante is anything but immune to these more pessimistic perspectives. They are symbolized traditionally by the figure of Narcissus. In the end, nevertheless, Dante’s “argument” highlights the way that lyric self-​reflexivity can become a positive enactment and revelation of the very being of God as constituted by self-​reflexive relation. This is a vision that is largely lost in secular modernity, with its more pragmatic outlook on language as an instrument of communication serving to express only our own thoughts. But Dante can help us to see something more in language as a revelation that is theological and poetic at the same time. Dante teaches us to understand the lyrical self-​reflexivity of language as specifically “theological” in nature. Dante’s world-​shattering insight is encapsulated in the lesson that self-​ reflection can be a reflection of transcendence, a vehicle to a beyond of language opening it to others and even to a divine Other. Self-​reflection turns out to be quite the opposite of a closed circle of vanity that collapses the self upon itself. In a monotheistic vision of reality, the only true and absolute being is the one God. What is most proper to anyone’s individual being, then, is what most transcends one, the ultimate Cause of one’s

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94 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language being. Not what one has or even objectively is, but what makes one to be is one’s own most proper essence or highest truth. Only once the modern fiction of an ontologically autonomous self has been accepted and even become self-​evident does the proper seem to be only a transformation of property—​something that an individual possesses. At that point, one’s apparently ownmost being remains within the boundaries of what has been staked out as one’s own over against what belongs to others. In contrast, in a certain medieval metaphysical view, what is most proper to me is what most transcends me. It is the Being which causes or, even more fundamentally, creates and sustains my being. It is also what I share in common with all other beings, inasmuch as they, too, are created. The Trinity is a model of self-​love that manifests its fertility in creating others in an act of unlimited love. The circuit of love within the Trinity eventually issues in all created others, the whole cohort of created beings. In their turn, all created beings reach out toward reconnection with the Cause of All. Self-​love can be sterile for humans because, as isolated selves, they are lacking in true being and are thus caught up in a merely narcissistic delusion. But the prototype of love in the Godhead models, instead, a fertile, creative self-​love. The Trinitarian Creator Word enacts linguistic self-​reflection that engenders other loves (“nuovi amor”) in the panoramic exposition of Paradiso XXIX.13–​21 (quoted in section 40). This is a model that humans in their self-​reflexive conscious being and acts are well advised to imitate for the purpose of creatively shaping their own world through interactive reciprocity and ethical engagement. Without this redemptive redirection toward self-​transcendence, the narcissistic self-​reflexivity of language that is interested only in itself leads to skepticism and nominalism and eventually to nihilism. This syndrome is especially typical of modern times and becomes starkly evident soon after Dante in an already new age of culture with Chaucer. As the eagle that wisks Geoffrey off to the House of Fame suggests, words can be reduced to mere sounds: Soun ys noght but eyr ybroken; And every speche that ys spoken, Lowd or pryvee, foul or fair, In his substaunce ys but air … .1 (House of Fame, 765–​68) Such a view of language coheres with the nominalist thinking that surged to prominence in Chaucer’s England and became a pivotal issue for him.2 Although Dante, in his intellectual eclecticism, may very well have been receptive to such views of the intellectual avant-​guard, which were 1  The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin,  1987). 2 Sheila Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

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Eclipse of Trinity and Incarnation  95 being developed already in his time,3 he is far more deeply committed in his poetry to a view of language not as empty but as saturated with reality.4 Above all when used poetically, words in some sense contain or convey the realities they represent and make present as unsoundable mysteries—​albeit precisely by their sound! They may also be used in vain to signify nothing, but this misfiring is to be explained rather as the moral failure of the agents who use them. Even if it is the nature of words, as we use them humanly, to be empty and meaningless—​“vanity of vanities”—​their true being is anchored in a higher order of reality that rather saturates them with meaning. This higher order cannot be accurately represented in language, but it can be ritualistically enacted and “repeated,” as will be argued in Part III.

3  See Maria Corti, Dante a un nuovo crocevia (Florence: Sansoni, 1982) for discussion of Dante’s reception of views of Siger de Brabant and other radical Aristotelians. 4  Steven Botterill, “Dante’s Poetics of the Sacred Wood,” in Philosophy and Literature 20/​ 1 (1996): 154–​62.

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14  Narcissus and his Redemption by Dante

There is thus a serious risk involved in this self-​reflexivity that is so pervasive and foundational for language and for the very reality that is reflected in the medium of language. The emblem of this menace is Narcissus. Self-​ reflexivity can symbolize the very epitome of unproductive circularity—​ tautological emptiness—​as reproducing always the same. It relentlessly reduces all to the self and apparently makes no progress. Such sterile reiteration of what already exists can represent the epitome of vapidness and futility. And yet, self-​reflexivity can also show up as the fecund source of all production and creativity. We need to be able to identify and disentangle the generative and the degenerative models of narcissism in Dante’s poem and in the broader cultural worlds that it refracts. Narcissism’s linguistic equivalent is, precisely, the lyric: language in love with itself. As in narcissism, so in the lyric, the image in its immediacy, even the nakedly verbal image, asserts itself as absolute reality. Any other lover, and even any objective or referential meaning, at least provisionally, fades away into an insubstantial Echo, as language itself becomes primary, the source of its own higher reality—​or at least self-​ reflexively gives itself out to be such a self-​sustaining reality. Language in the lyric, absolved from being merely mediation of other things, asserts itself as something immediate and absolute. This self-​referentiality represents the key to language’s redemption through emulation of the divine Word—​and at the same time the risk of its greatest perversion and vanity. Narcissus in the Middle Ages is typically a negative exemplum—​as he often still is, at least in part, in the psychoanalytic critique of modern society.1 This was the tenor set already by Ovid’s satirical treatment.2 In Ovid’s myth in Metamorphoses V.338–​510, the irresistibly beautiful boy 1  Echoes of Narcissus (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), ed. Liebe Spaas, surveys some of the myth’s manifold reassessements and revaluations. 2 Kenneth J.  Knoespel, Narcissus and the Invention of Personal History (New  York: Garland, 1985), Chapter  1, analyzes Ovid’s own presentation of the myth. Chapter  2 reviews the medieval background, while Chapter 3 discusses medieval and Renaissance appropriations.

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Narcissus and his Redemption  97 Narcissus is the illegitimate offspring of the nymph Liriopé, who was violated by the god Cephise. At his birth, the question of whether he will live a long life is answered by Tiresias to the effect that he may do so, but only “if he does not know himself” (“Si se non noverit,” 348). The dangers of self-​knowledge are thus flagged at the outset as the moral of the story. There is a thought-​provoking reversal here of the conventional wisdom “Know thyself” that was inscribed over the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Knowing his own image proves fatal to Narcissus, since he falls desperately in love with it and cannot detach himself. In the biblical archetype, likewise, the state of blessedness in the Garden of Eden is one of innocence or unknowing, and it is only after the Fall that Adam and Eve become self-​aware. They then reflect and know that they are naked, and are ashamed (Genesis 3:7). Dante similarly represents the serpent in the Garden in insistently self-​reflexive language: it turns its head again and again (“volgenda ad or ad ora la testa”) to lick its back like a beast that sleeks itself (“’l dosso leccando come bestia che si liscia,” Purgatorio VIII.100–​102). Of course, the serpent’s temptation of Eve by the promise of becoming like God, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:4–​ 5), also incites an insidious kind reflection on oneself. Traditionally, then, these stories warn against certain perils of the passion for self-​reflection. But Dante is trying to reinterpret self-​ reflection’s potential resources for wisdom as having more positive implications with regard to self-​knowledge. He is pioneering a revalorization of self-​reflection in relation to self-​transcendence that will gather force again on the threshold of the Romantic age, notably with Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s Narcisse ou l’amant de lui-​même (1732). Modern analysis of the myth’s ambivalence, pointing the way toward more positive valuations, was instigated by Lou-​ Andréas Salomé, Narzissismus als Doppelrichtung (1921) and further developed by the Psychoanalytisches Seminar Zürick.3 After all, self-​knowledge is the indispensable means to personal awakening and enlightenment in some of the oldest and most venerable strains of wisdom in the West, not least within Gnostic currents, where the soul’s own self-​reflection is necessary to orient it beyond a fallen world to its origin in another world, the world above.4 However, the dangers of the Gnostic path to self-​knowledge are also persistently contemplated by Dante and medieval tradition. The originally negative valence of Narcissus in Ovid remains evident in medieval moralizing treatments such as the Old French Lai de Narcisus (1165–​75) inserted into the early fourteenth-​century Ovide moralisé. Dante himself, in Inferno XXX, associates “the mirror of Narcissus” (“lo specchio di Narciso”) with base sins of counterfeiting in the persons of Mastro 3  Die neuen Narzißmustheorien: zurück ins Paradies? (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat,  1983). 4 On this Gnostic quest, see Henri-​ Charles Puech, En quête de la Gnose (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).

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98 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language Adamo and Sinon Greco. In Purgatorio XXX, Dante must be purified of the narcissistic gaze by looking away from his own image in the “clear spring” (“chiaro fonte”). Nevertheless, most significantly, a series of reflections of his own image in Purgatory builds up to a scene which has already been recognized by some as Dante’s reenactment and correction of the self-​reflexive sin of Narcissus.5 In the second half of Purgatorio XXX, Dante emerges as a “ ‘corrected’ Narcissus” who looks away in shame from his own image and cries tears of repentance rather than of frustrated desire, and so heads toward redeemed life rather than death.6 The similes surrounding the act of self-​ reflection in Purgatorio XXX.76–​79 as a purifying—​specifically as a melting of snow (“neve … liquefatta,” 85–​91) and a melting of candles (“par foco fonder la candela,” 90)—​are evidence of Dante’s reworking of Ovid’s text. They draw especially from Metamorphoses III.486–​90, with its “liquefacta” and “igne leui cerae matutinaeque pruinae” and “paulatim carpitur igne” for the melting of soft wax and morning frost by fire as images for the shedding of tears. Dante transforms Narcissus’s futile death into a scene of repentance leading to redemption and purified life. A moment earlier, Dante had already seen his left, his “sinister” or sinful, “side” mirrored in the reflecting waters of the Earthly Paradise: L’acqua inprendëa dal sinistro fianco, e rendea me la mia sinistra costa, s’io riguardava in lei, come specchio anco.

      (Purgatorio XXIX.67–​69)

(The water came up from the left bank,    and rendered my left side to me,    so that I looked into it just as into a mirror.) And even earlier, on entering into Purgatory proper by treading the three steps, Dante had mirrored himself, as if in self-​examination preparing for the rite of confession: … e lo scaglion primaio bianco marmo era sì pulito e terso, ch’io mi specchiai in esso qual io paio.

      (Purgatorio IX.94–​96)

5  Michelangelo Picone, “Dante e il mito di Narciso: Dal Roman de la Rose alla Commedia,” Romanische Forschungen 89 (1977): 382–​97. 6 Kevin Brownlee, “Dante and Narcissus (Purg. XXX, 76–​ 99),” Dante Studies 96 (1978):  201–​6.

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Narcissus and his Redemption  99 (… and the first crag was of white marble and was so clean and smooth that I mirrored myself in it just as I appear.) Such self-​mirroring serves for the critique of self and the repudiation of sin—​for repentance in order to restore an unblemished relation with the Creator and Redeemer God. Via such mirroring and self-​examination, the sinner is restored to the creaturely status of being a pure reflection of a transcendent divinity. The idea of a transcendent reflection—​this time not of the self so much as of an idealized, divinized image seen nevertheless by mirroring—​is clearly present again later at another key transition in Purgatory, where Dante dreams of Leah singing. Leah’s dream song focuses on her own beauty and adornment and represents the first of two different degrees of self-​reflection. The second is represented by her sister Rachel, who focuses on beautiful eyes as opposed to working hands and models a more contemplative form of self-​reflection: Per piacermi a lo specchio qui m’addorno;    ma mia suora Rachel mai non si smaga    dal suo miraglio, e siede tutto giorno. Ell’è d’i suoi belli occhi veder vaga    com’io de l’addornarmi con le mani;    lei lo vedere, e me l’overare appaga.

     (Purgatorio XXVII.103–​8)

(“To please myself at the mirror I here adorn myself;    but my sister Rachel never disenchants herself    from her mirror, and sits there all day long. She is delighted by the sight of her beautiful eyes    as I am by adorning myself with my hands;    she is satisfied by looking and I by doing.”) Rachel’s habitus looks dangerously vain. Yet, within the traditional allegory of Leah as the active and Rachel as the contemplative life, Rachel is understood to be really contemplating not just her own image, but Christ. These Old Testament figures serve as archetypes for a typological reading of the Martha and Mary story in the New Testament. While Mary sat apparently idle, yet was contemplating the Lord, her sister Martha was busy about many things. In answer to Martha’s complaint, Jesus replies, “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: but one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38–​42). Seemingly idle speculation often looks like self-​adulation but can in reality be contemplation of the divine. Poetry, particularly as Dante creates it in the Paradiso, would seem to be in this same ambiguous case.

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100 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language When Dante gazes into the mirrors of Beatrice’s eyes, after his cleansing in Lethe, he too beholds not just himself but an allegorical image of Christ—​the gryphon: Mille disiri più che fiamma caldi    strinsermi li occhi a li occhi rilucenti,    che pur sopra ’l grifone stavan saldi. Come in lo specchio il sol, non altrimenti    la doppia fiera dentro vi raggiava,    or con altri, or con altri reggimenti.

      (Purgatorio XXXI.118–​23)

(A thousand desires more than fire riveted    my eyes to the resplendent eyes    that on the gryphon remained fixed. As in a mirror the sun, not otherwise    the double beast was reflected therein,    now with some, now with other features.) The importance of this image as an allegory for reflection of transcendence—​the transcendent God incarnate in Christ, with his two natures—​has been grasped by critics.7 But how and why the pattern of redemption through self-​reflection extends to the figure of Narcissus calls to be worked out in detail and requires theological analysis. This is precisely what the Paradiso provides, as has already been suggested from different angles of approach.8 At the end of Purgatorio, Dante begins to use ineffability vis-​à-​vis Beatrice’s beauty in the way he will continue to develop throughout the Paradiso. The revelation of her beauty, once she finally smiles, induces uncontainable intensities of desire in him. His desire reflexively feeds on its own in/​satisfaction and is thereby made insatiable: “Mentre che piena di stupor e lieta    l’anima mia gustava di quel cibo    che, saziando di sé, di sé asseta …”

      (Purgatorio XXXI.127–​29)

7  Rodolphe Palgen, “L’Ascension du griffon,” Revue des études italiennes 11 (1965): 302–​28. 8  The project of a redeemed Narcissus to be discerned by vertical reading of the cantos XXX in each cantica is intriguingly adumbrated by R.  A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1983), especially Chapter  1: “Introduction: Narcissus and the Poet,” 21–​38. Important suggestions are found also in Roger Dragonetti, “Dante et Narcisse ou les faux-​monnayeurs de l’image,” Revue des études italiennes 11 (1965): 85–​146. The subject is pursued further in Heather Webb and George Corbett, eds., Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Open Book, 2015–​17). See also Akbari, Seeing through the Veil, 170–​77.

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Narcissus and his Redemption  101 (“While full of stupor and happy    my soul tasted of that food    that, in satiating of itself causes thirst for itself …”) After the mirroring gazes of both Rachel and Leah, which are reflected further in a certain self-​absorption of Mathelda in Purgatorio XXVIII.40–​41 and XXIX.4–​9 (the reflexive verb si gia describes her solitary movements), and after Dante’s repeated sightings of his own image, we cannot but acknowledge the necessity of passage by way of self-​reflection for the restoration to innocence in the Garden. However, Dante’s purification in Purgatory involves also—​inverting Narcissus—​a gazing at himself in abhorrence. Beatrice makes him face his life and its egregious failings when he sees himself in the clear stream of the pristine paradise of the Garden and is ashamed: Li occhi mi cadder giù nel chiaro fonte,    ma veggendomi in esso, i trassi a l’erba,    tanta vergogna mi gravò la fronte

            (Purgatorio XXX.76–​78)

(My eyes fell down upon the clear fount,    but seeing myself in it, I drew them back to the bank,    such was the shame that weighed on my brow.) Dante is made to see through and beyond self to a transcendentally pure origin reflected to him through Beatrice.9 This type of self-​gazing is modeled in Rachel, and perhaps also in Mathelda. In them, contemplation necessarily entails a structure of self-​reflection. Mathelda reflects an innocent eros regained in the Earthly Paradise pervaded and intensely colored by the desire she awakens. Self-​reflection and auto-​affection are restored to a kind of natural innocence: they are given a productive role in human growth and self-​building. From this point forward, and throughout the Paradiso, self-​reflection plays a progressively more positive role in Dante’s redemptive project.

Divine Narcissus The project of the Paradiso demands to be read as one of “transhumanizing” and redeeming Narcissus finally into “our effigy” (“nostra effige,” XXXIII.131) limned in Christ, the human face of God. God is himself a Narcissus by virtue of his total love for his own image in his only-​begotten

9 Moevs’s The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy revolves around contemplation passing through self and beyond to God. The Narcissus motif in particular is discussed on page 150.

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102 The Paradiso’s Theology of Language Son, as well as in the Creation, where he is more darkly and imperfectly reflected in a material substrate. Dante’s characteristic rhetoric, first and foremost his rhetoric about God, is intensively self-​referential and narcissistic. Dante emphasizes precisely the self-​love and self-​contemplation of God in capillary fashion throughout the whole of the Paradiso, perhaps most emphatically at the crowning height of his vision in the Empyrean: O luce etterna che sola in te sidi, sola t’intendi, e da te intelletta e intendente te ami e arridi.

(XXXIII.124–​26)

(O eternal light, who in yourself alone reside,   yourself alone comprehend, and by yourself contemplated   and contemplating smile on and love yourself.) Can it be an accident that, after the references to Narcissus in the thirtieth cantos of both the Inferno and Purgatorio, in precisely the thirtieth canto of the Paradiso the whole of heaven, comprising the choirs or militias of the blessed, narcissistically mirrors itself in God? E come clivo in acqua di suo imo    si specchia, quasi per vedersi adorno,    quando è nel verde e ne’ fioretti opimo, sì, soprastando al lume intorno intorno,    vidi specchiarsi in più di mille soglie    quanto di noi là su fatto ha ritorno.

          (XXX.109–​ 14)

(And like a hillside that from its bottom in water    mirrors itself, as if to see its own adornments,    when it is rich and flowers and verdant, so, standing over the light all around    I saw mirrored in more than a thousand thresholds    as many of us as have returned above.) Dante has taken over and theologized a narcissism intrinsic to the whole courtly world as reflected preeminently in the Roman de la rose, with its lyric landscape and its idealizing of love as a reflexive, self-​mirroring passion. The imagery of flowery adornment echoes Leah’s pleasing herself before her mirror (“Per piacermi a lo specchio, qui m’addorno,” 103) in Dante’s biblically based allegorical dream in Purgatorio XXVII. The Paradiso follows up with a constant stream of images of mirroring and self-​reflection.

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Narcissus and his Redemption  103 Narcissus, as the founding myth for self-​ reflection, is a keystone structuring the architecture of Western tradition in its entirety—​from its remote, unconscious origins to its most recent reverberations. The following reflections delve into self-​ reflection’s metaphysical logic in Parts II–​IV before returning in Part V to the Narcissus myth’s further ramifications in and around Dante’s work. Part II outlines the medieval emergence of modern self-​ reflection momentously in Dante and Duns Scotus among the Scholastics. Parts III and IV trace the structure of self-​reflection excavated from Dante’s texts forward through exemplary applications revealing its purport in modern thought and literature. Over the course of these comparisons, the issue of self-​reflection serves as fulcrum for discerning a disastrous distorting of humanity’s self-​ understanding entailed by reducing the medieval metaphysical and theological vision of an analogical cosmos constituted by and grounded on divine self-​reflection to a modern, technological world picture framed by and subservient to the self-​reflection of a self-​abstracted individual subject. Tragically lost is an intrinsically relational understanding of being and of being human.

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PART II

Self-​Reflection on the Threshold between the Middle Ages and Modernity A Theological Genealogy of the Birthing of Modernity as the Age of Representation

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15  Self-​Reflective Refoundation of Consciousness in Philosophy

“Self-​reflection” names the overarching project and central aim of philosophy in the modern period. Can knowledge ground itself in a purely self-​reflexive act? This is the ambition driving Descartes’s refounding of the edifice of knowledge on the self-​conscious “I think” or cogito in the seventeenth century. This goal is supposedly fulfilled in the nineteenth century by Hegel’s “absolute knowing” (“absolutes Wissen”) as the final attainment of spirit or Geist in its evolution to complete consciousness of itself as its own object in nature and history. Such reflective self-​ consciousness is still the aim of Husserl’s phenomenology in its striving to establish a presuppositionless philosophy by means of rigorous, scientific, critical self-​reflection focusing purely on what is given to consciousness (Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, 1910–​11). To achieve total, rational transparency to itself through philosophically adequate reflection is for thought to become self-​grounding. It can then account for itself through complete and absolute self-​reflection that is not conditioned or limited by anything outside itself. Can human reason, through the discipline of philosophy, perform such a feat? The quest for foundations that drives modern philosophy is a quest for reflection to give itself its own adequate grounds—​to make its own self-​reflection the foundation of knowledge. This quest has been pursued throughout modern philosophy most typically in an anti-​theological spirit as an assertion of the self-​grounding autonomy of human reason. Yet the model for it, ironically, is the self-​ grounding, reflective self-​sufficiency of God—​of divinity as understood in biblical and in other theologies, but particularly in Christianity, with its doctrine of the Trinity. This immense doctrinal field of speculation on the self-​reflexive, triune nature of God harbors one of the most sophisticated conceptual apparatuses ever elaborated for examining the range of subtle and intricate philosophical problems concerning self-​reflection. Among these problems, the constitution of personhood and of substantial being through mutual relations feature prominently. The relations that constitute the internal life of the Trinity provide a theological archetype for virtually any such structures of self-​relation as articulated in Western philosophy.

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108  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity Hegel was very aware of this. He raised this otherwise largely occulted derivation of reflective philosophy from Christian doctrine to a level of acute self-​consciousness. For Hegel, the doctrine of the Trinity was a model prophesying in mythical terms what is actually—​or concretely and rationally—​realized by human spirit in its achievement of total self-​ consciousness in the course of history.1 For most orthodox theological thinkers, human self-​reflection is not itself the highest truth, but only a reflex or an echo. For them, human self-​reflection is always deficient and somewhat untrue in comparison with the one absolutely true act of self-​ reflexivity realized by the Holy Trinity. But actually any such dichotomy between the religious and the secular can be challenged and undermined by the most radical thinking of self-​reflection, no matter from which side it is approached. Whether priority is given to its theological model or to its anthropological instantiation, self-​reflection, taken most radically, realizes the absolute in a concrete act that embraces humanity and divinity as complimentary constructions. The human and the divine both derive from self-​reflection as the underlying reality in relation to which they reveal themselves to be merely abstractions. Neither God nor humanity can be appropriately conceived except through the concept and the process of self-​reflection. Whether this process is viewed as essentially a human activity through an anthropology like Feuerbach’s in The Essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums, 1841) or as a divine act of consciousness and will through the perspective of a theology of revelation such as Karl Barth’s, the priority of self-​reflection itself to any such loaded constructions as “humanity” or “divinity” is paramount. The logic of self-​reflection is productive—​and not just the product—​of all such conceivable substances and persons and realities. In the evolution of human civilizations, poets are often first to feel out the yet unsuspected possibilities of spirit in a new age of culture. Revolutionary forms of self-​reflection were born with Troubadour poetry in the awakening of the modern individual to conscious awareness of self. This awareness of one’s own reflective capacities opened up an unprecedented sphere for contemplation and exploration. Particularly the capacity of self-​reflection in language engendered a domain of auto-​ affection—​of self-​engendering and self-​propagating desire. Discovery of these capacities was grounded in some crucial ways on theology, particularly on the self-​ knowing and self-​ loving that constitute the Trinity. Troubadour poetry already evinces some clear traces of conscious awareness of this genealogy (section 5). But it is Dante, both in his poetic and in his theoretical work, who most searchingly elaborates and explores the inextricably theological underpinnings of self-​ reflection. 1 Peter Koslowski, “Hegel—​ ‘der Philosoph der Trinität?’ Zur Kontroverse um seine Trinitätslehre,” Theologische Quartalschrift 162 (1982): 105–​32, 117–​21.

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Refoundation of Consciousness  109 Especially in his culminating work, Paradiso, he delivers an incomparable testament of the productive and constructive possibilities of self-​ reflection (sections 7–​13). By means of this conceptual focus on self-​ reflexivity, Dante can be written into the history of philosophy in a way that historiographies of philosophy have generally ignored until now. A deeper and broader-​based understanding of the history of Western thought becomes possible through this recovery and revaluation of the poetic thinking with which modern thought actually begins. Mythological modes and metaphors—​such as “all is water” (Thales), “all is air” (Anaximander), “all is fire” (Heraclitus)—​ cast the breaking light of day for philosophical thinking in ancient, pre-​ Socratic philosophy. Analogously, a mythopoeic moment, one which has until now been largely overlooked or suppressed, breaks ground and issues in the birth of modern thought. We know from our own experience that, most often, we understand things intuitively before we are able to grasp and explain them analytically. Poetic predecessors’ imaginations anticipate the rational work of philosophers in developing the possibilities of self-​reflection inhering in the human spirit. These creative impulses can be observed in nuce in their nascent state in poets long before they are fully exploited—​and at the same time inevitably betrayed—​by further development through systematic thought. Modernity since Descartes has constituted itself quintessentially as the age of the philosophy of reflection. Being and event come to be experienced as belonging to someone—​a subject, one who reflects on them as his or her own experience. Modern philosophy construed experience as founded on the immanence of the subject and its own self-​reflection. Such was the basis of knowledge of the real from Descartes and Kant through Hegel and Husserl. Heidegger, returning to ancient Greek thinking, began to break with this modern, humanist paradigm and to make philosophizing pivot, instead, from the transcendence of Being (Sein) as a non-​reflexive presence prior to the thinking subject and all its epistemological reflections. Levinas pursued this meditation, breaking through to the transcendence of the ethical Other, which opened a space for a certain kind of postmodern thinking as realized by the likes of Derrida. Self-​reflection and subjectivity itself, in a typical postmodern perspective, is given from the Other. It is not to be understood as an activity only in and from the self operating on and by itself. Instead of having its starting point in itself as self-​founding, self-​reflection originates in some species of transcendence. This postmodern outlook curiously doubles back in a crucial respect to the premodern perspective of Dante. Dante, too, presents self-​reflection as itself already a reflection of transcendence, which he does not hesitate to interpret theologically. By viewing the origin of modern thought from the vantage point of Dante, we bring back into focus the originally theological source and model of the quest for autonomous foundations in self-​reflection. In this revisionary historiography of

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110  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity modern thought, theology comes to light as the repressed mediator that returns in our postmodern moment.2

Self-​Reflection and the Other If we ask whether reflection is necessarily self-​reflection, we discover a crucial nuance of difference between the two. On the one hand, reflection is leveraged from the self or from self-​conscious reflection as the foundation of knowledge and consciousness in the Cartesian cogito. On the other hand, reflection can destabilize the self and place it radically into question. Self-​reflection is not necessarily contained by the self’s returning to its point of departure and by its controlling reflection on itself as a stable and self-​possessed pole of activity. Reflection can also be an operation encompassing the self from outside and first bringing it to itself from a departure point already beyond it. The self is then constituted as always already beholden to an Other.3 Much of what follows is aimed at reconfiguring self-​reflection not as the autonomous act of a presumably self-​sufficient, sovereign subject but as a revelation of the subject to itself in the frame of a higher instance of reflection that transcends it. This higher instance is one of which the self is itself only a reflection and repetition. Such is the theory of self-​ reflection elaborated in Trinitarian theology from Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine through medieval tradition all the way to contemporary Trinitarian theologians.4 To attain to this critical perspective, we have to consider recent developments of thought that recoil from the dominant tendencies of modern self-​reflexive philosophy to exalt the sovereign, free, self-​reflective subject. Trenchantly critical of modern thought, they are often styled “postmodern.” Most evident in these countermovements is the backlash against modernity’s attempt to establish the autonomy and self-​contained integrity of the individual self. Modernity has typically represented itself as an emphatically post-​ medieval age of thought in its quest for new foundations of knowledge in the immanent, self-​reflective, self-​grounding awareness of reason itself. Emblematic here is Descartes’s cogito or “I think” as the Archimedean 2 Johannes Hoff works out such a theological genealogy of postmodern thinking in Spiritualität und Sprachverlust: Theologie nach Foucault und Derrida (Munich: Paderborn, 1999). Graham Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Macmillan, 2000) offers some valuable pointers in this direction, uncovering theological subtexts lurking within postmodern theoretical discourses. 3  Paul Ricoeur, Soi-​même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990), trans. Kathleen Blamey, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) attempts to rethink self-​ reflection from such a post-​Cartesian standpoint. 4 Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An “Essay on the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) unravels some of the contemporary inflections of traditional Trinitarian thought, especially as they undo rational self-​mastery in relation to gender issues.

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Refoundation of Consciousness  111 point serving for a refoundation of the entire edifice of knowledge from the ground up. It is a piquant irony of intellectual history that this quest for self-​reflective foundations is itself a relique of the Middle Ages. The task of a self-​reflective founding of knowledge was actually bequeathed by the Middle Ages, as Dante makes perspicuous. Modernity took this task over, but deprived itself of the means of fulfilling it. The Trinitarian God provided the Middle Ages with the grounding instance of self-​reflection that human, rational self-​reflection could model itself on and repeat. In this sense, David Burrell, in introducing the work of Olivier-​Thomas Venard, suggests that postmodernity is, after all, “post-​post-​medieval.”5 After the failure of modern thought to find or establish its foundation in rational reflection itself, a certain postmodernity, as represented by Venard, returns to the language of faith as the most deep-​seated form of philosophical reflection. The existential depth of being, which is beyond the purely rational grasp of the subject and can only be believed, must also be reflected in the act of consciousness if consciousness is to be complete, since this completeness requires it to be connected with its own hidden grounds. There have been numerous attempts to recuperate in purely secular terms self-​reflection or self-​referentiality as the crucial question for contemporary philosophy, a question of its life or death.6 Even theologically sensitive thinkers like Paul Ricoeur often attempt to bracket theological considerations in their philosophical reflections on self-​ reflection. However, others have foregrounded theology as holding indispensable keys to rethinking the metaphysical bases of self-​reflection as the central issue in modern thought and culture. Theology posits, or at least allows for, a Subject metaphysically transcending the individual human subject that becomes central and foundational in the most typically modern outlooks. In premodern times, however, this divine Subject could only be analogically evoked by divine names. God was not any definable object and could not be comprehended under any univocal attributes of divinity. Reactivating this vision, David Bentley Hart plies an analogical metaphysics reaching beyond the limits of reflection on univocal terms in investigating the theological dimension of the divine names.7 He finds inspiration in Dionysius the Areopagite (writing before 532), who recognizes this dialectic of naming by analogy as thrusting beyond 5  Olivier-​Thomas Venard, Thomas d’Aquin poète théologien II. La langue de l’ineffable: Essai sur le fondement théologique de la métaphysique (Genève: Ad Solem, 2004), Préface, 10. 6  Isabelle Thomas-​Fogiel, Référence et autoréférence: Étude sur le thème de la fin de la philosophie dans la pensée contemporaine (Paris: Vrin, 2006), trans. Richard A. Lynch as The Death of Philosophy: Reference and Self-​Reference in Contemporary Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 7  David Bentley Hart, The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), Chapter  1, “The Offering of Names: Metaphysics, Nihilism, and Analogy,” 1–​44.

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112  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity merely philosophical analysis of the supposedly transcendent attributes of deity to a deeper dimension of relational transcendence. Hart charges Heidegger with forgetting the ontological difference made by Christianity with the Christian distinction between Creator and creature.8 He cogently maintains that Heidegger “never succeeded in understanding being as truly ontologically different from beings” (15). All of the German philosopher’s meditations on the Ereignis (the event) “serve only to confirm the event of the world in its own immanence, its ontic process, and all the while the real question of being fails to be posed” (15). We can find in Dante and in his analogical theological tradition a more radical questioning of being, one leveraged from the revelation of being’s absolute, “theological” transcendence, which Dante figures as a divinity that is no object but rather makes him an object and subjects him to seemingly impossible imperatives. In an analogous critique, William Platcher argues that many self-​ proclaimed postmodern theologies, such as the process theology of Ray Griffin or the a/​theology of Mark C.  Taylor, actually continue to be premised on a subject-​centered theism formulated in the seventeenth century.9 They thus participate in (rather than overcome) the ongoing enterprise of modern theology in its attempt to substitute clear and transparent conceptualizations of divinity for the unfathomable mystery of God that had dominated earlier theology by epoch-​making theologians from Aquinas through Luther and Calvin. The demand for transparent clarity and rational mastery regarding the concept of God was out of place in this premodern culture. It could not be expected that everything should be defined in humanly controlled terms, as if it could be digitalized and made to fit into a rational, analytic system. That pretension has once again come to appear unsustainable now with the advent of postmodern thought. One of the most incisive and consequential of these critiques of modernity is that formulated by Jacques Derrida.

8  Hart takes cues here from Janet Soskice, “Naming God: A Study in Faith and Reason,” in Reason and the Reasons of Faith, ed. Reinhard Hütter and Paul J. Griffiths (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2005), for whom creatio ex nihilo points up the Christian distance from rational theologies that comprehend divinity in terms of general attributes—​and miss God’s transcendence. 9  William C. Platcher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996).

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16  From Postmodern to Premodern Critique of Self-​Reflection—​ Egolology versus Theology

Rodolphe Gasché has construed Derrida’s pathbreaking thought for our postmodern era as a critique of “the philosophy of reflection.” Derrida critiques the self-​reflective type of philosophizing that has been pursued by Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl as representatives of the mainstream of modern Western philosophers. “Now what Derrida’s deconstruction has in view is precisely the undoing of the idea of self-​affection and, consequently, of all forms of self-​reflexivity.”1 In the early stages of his deconstructive project, Derrida critiques the relation of supposedly immediate self-​reflexivity in Husserl’s theory of voice and phenomenon.2 Derrida fundamentally contests the idea that the self can be immediately present to itself in the phenomenon of the voice—​in speaking to or with itself. The supposed privilege of voice in philosophy stems from its role as the medium of a self-​reflection of meaning in supposedly mirror-​ transparency and auto-​affection. Such is the Rousseauean model of the Romantic confession of the heart. Derrida rejects the schema of returning upon and regrounding oneself as one’s own origin through reflection, or more exactly through self-​reflection. It is important to qualify this interpretation by specifying that the critique applies only when self-​reflection works as a means of sealing off the system of the self from the outside and thereby insulating it from its “others.” Derrida, in effect, “deconstructs” such closural schemas by showing how the system always presupposes and surreptitiously relies on what it pretends to exclude. Inside and outside contaminate each other, and this is so for structural reasons inherent in the nature of language and its making of significant differences in general. Derrida is certainly right that the outside is already present on the inside once it is linguistically defined, for this contamination is brought about inevitably by the differential logic of mutually defining terms. 1 Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 35. This book follows up on Gasché’s The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 2  Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967).

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114  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity There is, however, also another movement of self-​reflection which springs the system open to the Indefinable that all definitions tacitly presuppose. Before the definition of either of two differentially opposed terms, there is the undefined potential from which both spring. This “infra-​ real” instance (in the sense of being before the emergence of differentiated things or res) requires an apophatic logic of negation even just to be discerned. “Deconstruction” can operate as such a logic and has so operated, I maintain, throughout ancient and medieval tradition in thinkers like Dionysius, Eriugena, Eckhart, etc.3 Contemporary deconstruction’s own presumable closure to God, transcendence, religion, and the like, is the limit at which it betrays its own inescapable dogmatism as a discourse that differentiates itself from what it opposes. As he developed, Derrida himself did all he could to deconstruct this type of deconstructive dogmatism. Through his persistent engagements with discourses of religion, and particularly with negative theology in his later work, he eschewed the closure of deconstruction as a stable, defined intellectual paradigm that could simply be applied.4 Ultimately, deconstruction aims not to dismiss its objects but to call forth its others. Even so, and leaving aside his epigones, Derrida’s own discourse stands up only by virtue of what it opposes. Frank Kermode pointed out that Derrida needs to make theology his bogey in order for différance to appear different from everything else and hence to have a point.5 But, strictly speaking, no oppositionality is possible without entering into a system with what one wishes to be different from and to deconstruct—​in this case theology. “This rather hectic and repeated emphasis may suggest that it is Derrida himself rather than the opponents he cites (without naming them) who most obstinately brings up this question of negative theology and its resemblances to différance. It is as if he were self-​ threatened with a theology, or an atheology—​with the desire for a realm, however vacant—​ and finds the prospect disturbing” (76). Kermode suggests that the discourse of the hyperessential—​the transcendent being of God that is beyond all knowing, as in Dionysius—​and Derrida’s discourse of différance are mutually dependent (89). This casts some light on why Gasché reads Derrida as a “quasi-​ transcendental” philosopher in the lineage of Kant, who remains agnostic about what there actually is and answers, instead, only to the question concerning the conditions of possibility of knowing. Even if there is an infinite consciousness (or God) to which all is present in a totally 3  I make this argument in On What Cannot Be Said, vol. 2, 443–​47; 26–​36. 4  Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. H. Coward and T. Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 5 Frank Kermode, “Endings, Continued,” Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

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Egolology versus Theology  115 systematic knowing, in any case we cannot know such a knowing. Hence the negative-​theological penumbra that is cast by transcendental reflection in the Kantian sense. In “Comment ne pas parler” (“How to Avoid Speaking”), Derrida admits that the theological interpretation according to which “God would be the truth of all negativity” remains undecidable for deconstruction. “This reading will always be possible. Who could prohibit it? In the name of what?”6 Clearly, the critique of self-​reflection does not settle the question of God, once belief in God is not proposed as a logical inference from the self’s own self-​knowledge. Instead, belief in God, for the postmodern and for the premodern sensibility, can be admitted to be sustained by a relation of unknowing directed toward a mystery beyond our conception. The crucial question about self-​reflection, then, is whether it re-​flects (bends, folds, flectere) back again (re) to settle and establish the self as a constituted entity or rather deconstructs the self as only constructed in and through reflection. Self-​reflection has been a foundational discourse throughout the modern age of philosophy. Reflection was presumably pursued from Descartes through Husserl as the means by which the self could establish itself as the foundation of knowing. However, self-​reflection can also be an exercise in breaking down the confines of selfhood: witness the dis-​unity of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre shattered by a multiplicity of pseudonyms. Self-​reflection can aim to find a way of exiting from the constricting enclosure of the self, of opening the self to others and, most importantly, to the absolute Other from which it conceivably proceeds. This is, in fact, more the spirit of the ancient and medieval tradition of wisdom pivoting on the injunction “Know Thyself” (nosse te ipsum).7 Knowing oneself meant, above all, knowing one’s limits and one’s lack of a foundation in oneself alone. This orientation is relayed in Dante’s medieval Latin tradition by Boethius (480–​524). When the disgraced Roman philosopher is visited in his prison cell by the allegorical figure of Lady Philosophy, she tells him the real cause of his unhappiness and of the sickness of his soul. It is not his physical confinement, nor even his public defamation, but something else entirely, namely, that he has ceased to know himself (Iam scio, inqui, morbi tui aliam vel maximam causam: quid ipse sis nosse desisti).8 Since Greek antiquity, the Delphic oracle has served as a motto to guide philosophical inquiry venturing down the path of self-​reflection. It presides over the relentless critical questioning pursued by Socrates, who was reported by Plato to have taught that the unexamined life is not worth living (Apology 38a). This questioning indicates a route not 6  Jacques Derrida, “Comment ne pas parler: Dénégations,” in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 435–​95. 7 Pierre Courcelle, Connais-​ toi toi-​ même, de Socrate à Saint Bernard (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1974–​75). 8  De philosophiae consolatione (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), I.vi,112.

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116  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity to founding certain knowledge on the self, but rather to sharpening and deepening awareness of the limits of the self, of its final nullity in the overall scheme of things. A  Renaissance spirit such as Michel de Montaigne (1533–​92), thinking and writing in the medieval memento mortis tradition (Essais I.xx: “Que Philosopher, c’est apprendre a mourir”), represents this approach in a way that directly contrasts with the Cartesian foundations project. What one learns to know fundamentally is that one does not know. This was the (anti-​)wisdom that, according to the oracle, set Socrates apart from other humans. Such knowing of unknowing underlies a tradition of negative theology that stretches from Augustine and Eriugena to Bonaventure and Nicholas of Cusa. The latter makes it programmatic under the title On Learned Ignorance and links it explicitly with Socrates.9 There are analogous apophatic forms of logic at work in thinkers long before, as well as since, Dante. Dionysius, Maimonides, Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Silesius Angelus (combined with the others named in the preceding paragraph and with Longinus at the head of a rhetorical tradition of reflection on ineffability) form one important axis backgrounding and contextualizing this orientation of Dante, which climaxes in the Paradiso. These theological thinkers developed certain types of self-​ reflection that were characteristic of medieval models of knowing, specifically of medieval approaches to representation of the transcendent. The major innovations of modern thinking eventually rendered remote and even unintelligible these apophatic modes of thought revolving around no definable object. The modern innovations enacted a shift from analogical to univocal thinking in the age of Duns Scotus (1265/​66–​1308)—​ exactly contemporary with Dante—​and from realism to nominalism in its direct aftermath, with William of Ockham (1287–​1347).10 The balance of Part II brings out the ambiguity of Duns’s own thought by suggesting how his legacy fosters the scientific worldview that understands itself as independent of theology in a manner that Dante’s alternative inauguration of modernity, if it were heeded, could serve to counterpoint and even to contest.

9  Book I, Chapter 26 of Cusa’s De docta ignorantia discusses negative theology specifically. Book I, Chapter 1.4 mentions Socrates. 10  Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) develops this “nominalist revolution” as decisive for the advent of modernity.

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17  Self-​Reflection in the Turning from Medieval to Modern Epistemology

The history of self-​reflection, at its crucial turning point in the Middle Ages, has been the object of voluminous and acute scholarly study. A  series of works by François-​Xavier Putallaz directly focuses on self-​ reflection in key medieval philosophers or theologians.1 Less explicit in this regard, but among the most unified and imposing accounts, is Olivier Boulnois’s reconstruction of this history in Being and Representation.2 Boulnois’s genealogy of modern metaphysics in the age of John Duns Scotus (thirteenth–​fourteenth centuries), following Étienne Gilson, shows that structures of self-​reflection are the backbone of knowledge as it was conceived in the Middle Ages. Self-​reflection thus bears centrally on the status of metaphysics as purportedly foundational knowledge. Crucial for Boulnois is specifically the issue of when and with whom to place the origin of “onto-​theology,” in which Being is interpreted both as what is common to all beings (ens communis) and as the eminent being, God.3 It is from Duns Scotus (who builds here on Henry of Ghent) that a clear distinction is established between metaphysica generalis, dealing with being as such (ens in quantum ens), and metaphysica specialis, treating the eminent being, Deus, that is the principle of all beings. These two different metaphysics were codified as such later by the Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548–​1617). But, for Boulnois, it is with Duns that these two types of knowing are effectively distinguished and coordinated. Therewith onto-​theology, properly speaking, begins as a peculiarly positive mode of metaphysics. I aim to show that this entails a shift in the valence of self-​reflection that decisively shapes the destiny of the West, a shift from being God-​centered to being self-​centered—​or from dissolving 1   Francois-​Xavier Putallaz, La connaissance de soi au xiii siècle: De Matthieu d’Aquasparta à Thierry de Freiberg (Paris: Vrin, 1991); Le sens de la réflexion chez Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1991); “La connaissance du soi au xiii siècle: Siger de Brabant,” Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age 59 (1992): 89–​157. 2  Olivier Boulnois, Être et représentation. Une généalogie de la métaphysique moderne à l’époque de Duns Scotus (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). 3  Être et représentation, 457–​70: “Naissance de l’ontothéologie.” Boulnois brings this specific question to focus also in “Quand commence l’ontothéologie? Aristote, Thomas d’Aquin et Duns Scot,” Revue Thomiste 95 (1995): 85–​108.

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118  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity the self in the Unfathomable to distilling everything into the self’s own conscious purview, a self-​ imposed, willfully invented structure. This shift sows the seed of a separate, objective knowledge of finite things in the world by a subject eventually considering itself, too, as just another objective being in the world. The metaphysical difference here proves decisive in every domain of human life. Boulnois sees much that is incomparably positive and progressive in Duns’s metaphysics. He is not entirely following Étienne Gilson’s interpretation of Scotus as having substituted essence for existence as the key to being, thereby initiating the history of decline of metaphysics into onto-​theology.4 This latter scenario makes Scotus culpable of instigating (in Heidegger’s terms) the forgetting of being. This is the tack taken up and developed by John Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy to the full extent of its potential (and perhaps even beyond) in situating Scotus as “the turning point in the destiny of the West.”5 Milbank is joined in this negative assessment by Catherine Pickstock, Conor Cunningham, Adrian Pabst, and others.6 For many scholars, this vilification of Scotus is unwarranted.7 For Boulnois, as for Radical Orthodoxy, the epoch from Duns Scotus to Kant (1724–​1804) is indeed marked by a separation of metaphysics from theology. Metaphysics becomes a theologically neutral examination of being, including the highest being. However, Boulnois sees this purely rational treatment of being in a more positive light that, in fact, opens the way for all the phenomenal progress of modernity that is rendered possible by modern science. In the new, proto-​modern outlook, verifiable knowledge is no longer founded in the heavens, nor even in the world, but rather in the self and its own self-​reflection. This follows from Duns Scotus, who begins to reconstruct the world through self-​reflection by creating univocal concepts. Duns clearly separates a metaphysics based on rational reflection from theological knowledge based on revelation. Duns gives metaphysics an autonomous, rational foundation, and this becomes the basis of a modern understanding of self-​reflection such as Descartes will eventually erect.

4  Étienne Gilson, L’Être et l’essence (Paris: Vrin, 1948). See also Gilson’s Jean Duns Scot: Introduction à ses positions fondamentales (Paris: Vrin, 1952). 5 Milbank articulates his case against Scotus in Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991)  and develops it further in Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013). 6 See especially Catherine Pickstock, “Duns Scotus: His Historical and Contemporary Significance,” Modern Theology 21/​4 (2005): 543–​74. 7 Daniel P.  Horan questions and critiques Radical Orthodoxy’s interpretation in Postmodernity and Univocity: A Critical Account of Radical Orthodoxy and John Duns Scotus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). Such critique was effectively initiated already in Wayne J.  Hankey and Douglas Hedley, eds., Deconstructing Radical Orthodoxy: Postmodern Theology, Rhetoric and Truth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

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Self-Reflection in the Turning  119 There is already a kind of foundational discourse based on philosophical self-​reflection in Duns. It begins by admitting our lack of real, concrete knowledge of transcendentalia, or divine attributes. In Kant, all knowledge of transcendent being is explicitly renounced, and critical transcendental reflection aims only at disclosing the conditions of possibility of knowing as they operate a priori in the mind of the individual subject and its own self-​aware, conscious reflection. In spite of this foundational discourse, there is still, I  endeavor to show, a kind of inadvertent negative theology in Duns, the kind that is perhaps more familiar to us today in or through Kant. It pertains to the things-​in-​themselves (Dinge-​an-​sich) that we cannot know. It employs no similitudes apt to give us an inkling of the divine and supernatural but only the blind acknowledgment of a transcendent reality. This acknowledgment admits that reality as such transcends our concepts. Meanwhile, concepts are granted untrammeled freedom to construct their own proper sphere of intelligibility. Their self-​reflexive power is such that they have mastered the human world in modern times through progressive technological domination of the planet. The self-​ reflexivity of concepts has been able to reconfigure the universe according to systems of its own devising. For Scotus, this new positivism in science was accompanied by an accentuated fideism in theology. Theology was supremely important to him, but it was less so and eventually became simply irrelevant for the scientific revolution that Duns, together with his Franciscan brothers, Roger Bacon and William of Ockham, had a major role in instigating. Boulnois emphasizes the radical and revolutionary import of Duns’s thinking, but he does not evaluate it primarily as a loss, as do those who have given Scotus central importance in intellectual and cultural history as the founder of a secular form of thinking that becomes dominant and leads to the eclipse of religion. Scotus has often been identified as the culprit in the demise of the medieval analogical worldview and its supplanting by a modern metaphysics, a rationalist outlook that becomes rigidly dogmatic as “onto-​theology.” Boulnois admits the secular thrust of Duns’s modern metaphysical thinking, but not that it needs to exclude or eclipse religion. A thoroughgoing revision of the philosophical historiography on Scotus moving in the direction of this more positive treatment is currently underway and has gathered together the efforts of a number of eminent scholars, including Boulnois.8 It is symptomatic of the need for new genealogical lines of interpretation such as the book in hand also endeavors to forge. Put most simply, Duns’s game-​changer is to begin with the concepts that can be defined at least formally in our own terms and in such a way 8  Edward J. Ondrako, ed., The Newman-​Scotus Reader: Contexts-​Commonalities (New Bedford, MA: The Academy of the Immaculate, 2015). The case for this revision is stated here sharply and urgently by Cyril O’Regan, “Scotus the Nefarious: Uncovering Genealogical Sophistications,” 637–​38.

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120  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity that our own human powers are adequate to think them. He lets the indefinable and transcendent remain precisely that. He refuses to continue to attempt to discern divinity’s mysterious incidence upon our experience and knowledge by techniques that are less than analytically transparent. This enables him to establish a clear and certain foundation for natural knowing, which he understands as “metaphysics.” We do have transcendental concepts in the sense that Kant will later define more systematically. These are concepts that are necessary for all thinking within a certain domain such as that of empirical experience.9 Such concepts circumscribe the limits of our thinking, and Duns is determined, like Kant, to stay within those limits rather than to attempt to think beyond them. This holds as far as rational scientific thinking is concerned. The transcendent “beyond” (as distinct from transcendental concepts) remains accessible through revelation, or else through the practical action of willing, but in any case not as an object of theoretical knowing. This distinction between theoretical and practical knowing, with their respective limits, is a crucial issue for us still today. Do we want to push these limits to a point where knowing exceeds the scope of possible reflective recuperation by a self-​comprehending consciousness and run the concomitant risks? Or is the better part of wisdom to invest oneself in self-​reflection that knows its own limits and how to abide within them? Dante stages the drama of this dilemma with great pathos in struggling against the fate of his self-​deceived alter ego, Ulysses.10 We can fully appreciate the historical import of Dante’s cultural project in some of its subtlest and most revealing aspects by considering him in light of this parallel with Duns Scotus.

9 For a reconstruction of the transcendental science of such concepts, see Ludger Honnefelder, Scientia Transcendens: Die formale Bestimmung der Seiendheit und Realität in der Metaphysik des Mittelalters und Neuzeit (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990). 10 Piero Boitani sounds this figure broadly in an “archeology of modern humanity” in Sulle orme di Ulisse (Bologna: Mulino: 2007); L’ombra di Ulisse (Bologna: Mulino: 2012 [1992]); and Il grande racconto di Ulisse (Bologna: Mulino: 2016).

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18  Crisis of Conflicting Worldviews and Duns Scotus

Beginning from the mid-​twelfth century, a new scientific approach to reality came into vogue in the Latin world. It was spurred by the rediscovery of Aristotle’s major works, especially his Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and the full corpus of his logical writings translated from Arabic and transmitted by his commentators and interpreters, signally Avicenna, Alfarabi, and Averroes. This Aristotelian scientific outlook was integrated into the purview of the philosophical culture that was current in Western Europe. The work of Albert the Great, followed up by Thomas Aquinas, among others, aimed at forging this synthesis, which took place especially at the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Cologne, where a wider range of subjects was brought into mutual interaction under the roof of the faculty of the arts (artes) alongside that of theology. This structure differed significantly from the situation that prevailed at universities based on specialization in jurisprudence (Bologna) or medicine (Scuola Medica Salernitana). Ludger Honnefelder maintains that this accentuated interdisciplinarity fostered new methods of thinking in which different sciences and their diverse methods were allowed to coexist and interact rather than being strictly confined and regulated by a unitary conception of knowing in which theology, statically conceived, was at the top of the hierarchy.1 An enormous upheaval was provoked by the new wave of secular science convoyed by Aristotle’s works coming into circulation—​in spite of a 1230 interdiction against using them as textbooks. This sea change was the original arena of confrontation between a (Greek-​Arabic) scientific worldview based on observation and logical deduction versus a knowledge grounded in (Judeo-​Christian) revelation and the authority of theological doctrine derived from a canonical book (the Bible) and promulgated through an ecclesiastical magisterium. During the Patristic period, theology had been proclaimed as the “true philosophy” by Christian authors from Justin Martyr through Clement

1 Ludger Honnefelder, Woher kommen wir? Ursprünge der Moderne im Denken des Mittelalters (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2008).

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122  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity of Alexandria and Origen to Augustine. This assertion of hegemony continued into the early Middle Ages. But with the rediscovery of Aristotle’s scientific works, the relation between philosophy and theology changed profoundly. The two approaches to the highest knowledge became mutually independent and able to challenge one another reciprocally. Aristotle exploited human reason as the appropriate means to know the causes and principles of things (Metaphysics I, 1–​2). Rather than a single authoritative Word or discourse of revelation that knows all in one, a plurality of sciences in this new perspective was necessary for knowing differentiated fields of objects. Adumbrated here already is the tension between a religious appeal to an all-​unifying Wisdom and the demands of specialized disciplinary knowledge. Albertus Magnus, in extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s works, took over and developed the new model of a network of sciences operating each with their different methods. He deemed them to be compatible with still another, different type of science based on theology and revelation. Honnefelder characterizes this model as an encyclopedia of different disciplines rather than just an encyclopedia of contents brought under a unitary notion and structure of knowing such as was previously the aim and ideal of scholars in the Latin Middle Ages.2 Different approaches and methods were required to penetrate different kinds of reality, which could no longer be treated simply as a monolith. Thomas Aquinas pursued this line of thinking with ingenuity. Through articulation of their differences, he aimed to bring the two cultures—​Christian revelation and secular science—​into fruitful cross-​pollination. Following the lead of his teacher Albert, Thomas refused to support either the banning of rational scientific inquiry by ecclesiastical authority or the attempt to keep the two paradigms of knowing separate so as to avoid all confrontation and even communication between them.

Duns’s Original Concept—​Univocal Being The most radical and consequential innovations addressing this problem of integrating the two cultures are offered a generation after Aquinas (1224–​74) by Duns Scotus (1265/​66–​1308). Scotus sees that freedom, individuality, and a history of salvation are essential realities for biblical revelation as understood by his Franciscan brothers. Yet he also sees that these Judeo-​Christian principles are not easily reconciled with the determinism through necessary and universal natural causes envisaged by the Greek-​Arabic method of ascertaining scientific truth. The latter method had become an ineluctable criterion in his cultural world at universities such as Oxford and Paris. We are still struggling today with an analogous 2 Honnefelder, Johannes Duns Scotus: Denker auf der Schwelle vom mittelalterlichen zum neuzeitlichen Denken (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011).

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Crisis of Conflicting Worldviews  123 problem of integration in the conflict of faculties between the cognitive sciences aiming to explain everything human as determined by physical processes in the brain and the humanities with their irreducible vocabulary of will and agency. In an original and destiny-​laden response to this predicament of impasse, Scotus begins thinking in terms of a neutral concept of Being that can be known without deciding whether it is finite or infinite. By means of our natural faculties, we know it simply and univocally as “Being.” This creates an immanent sphere of knowing that is commensurate with our capacities for conceptualizing. Such a sphere is the realm of being that we can know and deal with scientifically. Its concepts, like Kantian categories, are recognized as necessary for any human knowing whatsoever. Scotus acknowledges another, higher sphere of transcendent and divine reality, but he brackets it as inaccessible for distinct theoretical knowing. He thereby grants science its charter for establishing its mastery over the earth in the domain of the finite as its proper object. Paradoxically, by thinking Being neutrally, in a way that unites infinite and finite being indistinctly, Scotus enables the humanly thinkable realm to become complete and autonomous in itself rather than remaining dependent on another, higher realm, one revealed by theology—​to which scientific investigation formerly was obliged to defer. In effect, Scotus’s univocal concept of Being enables a separation of the immanent from the transcendent orders. There is the sphere of what is subject to human concepts, and then there is the transcendent sphere of what is not. But the humanly known sphere, thanks to the univocal concept of being, is deemed sufficient to provide its own foundation. This way of dividing up the real according to our ability to know it will remain intact essentially through Kant. It anticipates the “epistemological turn” so essential to modern thought as founded by Descartes. Scotus still cares a lot about the transcendent sphere, which can be accessed through revelation, as well as practically through ethics and the will. But theology is no longer necessary for knowledge of the finite sphere, and Scotus’s successors, in laying the foundations of modern science, will eventually forsake this interest in theology as irrelevant in order to concentrate exclusively on the finite, phenomenological realm in which empirical, experimental method alone reigns supreme. This realm of autonomy is produced essentially by conceptual reflection. The mind furnishes its own concepts and imposes them on the real. Its concepts are reflections of itself and of its own formative powers. This autonomous, human knowing forges the template for a momentously modern philosophical outlook and approach to knowledge that eventually leads in its evolution to systematic, foundational formulations from the seventeenth century onward, with Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and others.

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19  Toward the Self-​Reflexive Formation of Transcendental Concepts

The process of concept formation had long been understood as proceeding on the basis of self-​reflection. This is especially so for the stream of medieval epistemology that departs from Aristotle and rests, rather, on the Neoplatonic tradition transmitted through Avicenna to the Franciscans. On this latter model, there can be no direct action of bodies on the soul, but only the soul’s own auto-​affection in the production of images that then enable concepts to be formed. Images cannot simply be abstracted by the active intellect from objects, as the original Aristotelian model postulates. Instead, they must be produced in the mind through a process that entails reflection by the mind on itself. The soul can respond to physical occasions, as Avicenna suggested, and, as Augustine insists, the soul’s images are made “of itself.” They are produced within the mind by self-​ reflection rather than being abstracted from external objects as “species” or essences. This self-​reflective status accorded to concepts is extended by Scotus even to the concept of Being.1 It is hard to overstate, but at the same time easy to overlook, the importance of this astonishing innovation whereby Duns Scotus thinks the condition of possibility of experience in a self-​reflective concept of the Being that is also a real foundation, the basis of everything that exists. The concept of Being as such, which is indistinctly finite and infinite, is now analogous to other concepts that can be comprehended self-​reflectively. Like Avicenna’s essences, common natures in general for Scotus are neither universal nor particular, neither one nor many, but the condition of possibility for all such distinctions.2 The knowledge of common natures is a priori. It is based not on empirical experience, but is a knowledge simply of what is conceivable.

1 See especially Scotus, Quodlibet, q.13. For elucidation, see Boulnois, Être et représentation, 88–​97 and Boulnois, Duns Scot: La rigueur de la charité (Paris: Éditions de Cerf, 1998), 68. 2  Alain de Libera, La querelle des universaux: De Platon à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: Seuil, 2014 [1996]), 425, 433 highlights the paramount importance of this move seen from within the history of controversies over the status of universals.

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Formation of Transcendental Concepts  125 The reconceiving of Being as formed like other concepts is a first giant step toward programmatically making self-​reflection the foundation of all scientific knowing. This is accomplished by the Franciscan Scholastics in the thirteenth century through their development of an Avicennien Augustinianism. This Neoplatonically grounded strand of thought makes the mind’s reflection on itself primary in knowing. As Plotinus himself had already argued in his Enneads, it is necessary to become intelligence in oneself and to take oneself as object of contemplation (see section 60 below). This is the genealogical line along which a great Neoplatonist and introspective psychologist, Augustine, became the indirect father of modernity. He fostered even remote, self-​adopted sons including Blaise Pascal and René Descartes, who were well aware of—​and acknowledged—​their indebtedness to him. What has been less well recognized is that this heritage passes by way of the Schoolmen.3 Descartes and Kant remain heavily indebted to Scholastic thinkers who anticipated their refoundings of philosophy, as has been demonstrated persuasively from a variety of angles by Gilson, Jean-​ Luc Marion, Radical Orthodoxy authors, and Jean-​ François Courtine.4 Particularly the doctrines concerning concept formation contributed to forging an Augustinianism of Avicennien character that would flourish especially among Franciscan theologians but that was first crystalized by Guillaume d’Auvergne (1228–​49) in his De universo (1230–​36). In this outlook, the elements of knowledge are fabricated self-​reflexively. Nevertheless, they do not form a closed system, as they are typically made to do with the modern subject and its mastering grasp of a universe through its own transcendental perspective. The latter, subject-​centered transcendence is what John Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy inveigh against as a false transcendence. It leads fatefully in modern thought to the Kantian system of epistemology-​based philosophy, installing the autonomous subject as the Archimedean point at the foundation of the whole edifice of knowledge. As generally read, Kant’s Transcendental Analytic grounds reflection on the finite human self rather than leveraging it from transcendent Being or the infinite. Human reason gives itself its own foundations in the form of its transcendental principles of knowing—​the a priori intuitions of space and time and the pure categories of the understanding discovered by means of transcendental reflection and demonstrated by transcendental deduction. Spinoza and Leibniz in the baroque period are still closer, in essential ways, than are Descartes (before them) and Kant (after them) to the medieval rationality for which eternity remains real because “reality” has not been reduced to experience and become merely a human production. Both of these baroque philosophers are still thinkers of the absolute, 3 In the case of Descartes, Gilson’s work, starting from his 1913 thesis La liberté chez Descartes et la théologie (Paris: Vrin, 1987), is seminal for bringing this filiation to light. 4  J.-​F. Courtine, Suárez et le système de la métaphysique (Paris: P.U.F., 1990).

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126  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity whether as Nature (Spinoza) or as Providence (Leibniz). They have not yet definitively lost and forgotten the medieval God-​centered universe in which the intellect was engaged first by the infinite and eternal.5 Humans do not make up the world by their own invention so much as conform to a higher reality than that produced by their own wills. But with Kant such theoretical knowledge of suprasensible realities is definitively lost, and it is only by means of the will that we can have any connection with ideals of immortality and divine justice and salvation. In instituting this split between theoretical and practical knowledge, Kant is following a direct genealogical line of descent from Scotus. Kant, at the fountainhead of Enlightenment philosophy, does nevertheless recognize the unknowable thing-​ in-​ itself (Ding-​an-​sich) as an absolute beyond human ken. To this extent, there is still some kind of negative theology operative in his thinking.6 However, his decisive move is to furnish the means—​ namely, through transcendental reflection a priori—​of knowing the conditions of possibility of knowing itself. This transcendental knowing is humanly possible through self-​reflection and is an entirely human making achieved in fulfillment of the Enlightenment project of affirming the autonomy of the human individual. This Kantian transcendental knowledge supposedly grounds all human knowing. Human reflection now manufactures its own transcendental ground and is not beholden to any Other. There is still here the admission that absolute reality, the realm of things in themselves, remains outside the self’s immanent sphere and is as such unknown. Consequently, there is still room here for a kind of piety, or for “religion within the limits of pure reason,” in Kant’s idiom. But actual knowing, at least theoretical knowing in a scientific sense, has been split off as a separate undertaking. It consists in a constructive building of knowledge on the foundations that human self-​reflection fabricates for itself. Faith and knowledge no longer work as partners striving after a knowledge (or ultimately an unknowing) of the whole. They are dissociated. Knowledge concerns itself only with its own self-​grounded constructions, and faith no longer has the duty, or the competence, to orient and guide human knowing. Faith still guides acting, but it has become irrelevant to the theoretical enterprise of knowing.

5 Curiously, both “baroque” thinkers open a breach in the most typical postulates of modern secular thinking, as Gilles Deleuze’s postmodern interpretations show in Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988) and in Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Minuit, 1968). 6 Stephen Palmquist’s reinterpretations of Kant as primarily a religious thinker effectively question the common premises of the reigning secularist readings and move Kant more into the light of a kind of negative theology. See Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion, ed. Christ L.  Firestone and Stephen R.  Palmquist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

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20  Severance of Theory from Practice, Disentangling of Infinite from Finite, by Transcendental Reflection

By means of transcendental reflection, the individual knowing subject makes its world autonomous and self-​grounding. The knower renounces the aspiration to comprehend, or even to contemplate, transcendent reality by finite powers of human mind. Instead, reflection on its own “conditions of possibility” enables human cognition to transcendentally construct or produce its own grounds. Of course, that reflection or consciousness, or anything else, exists at all remains unexplained. But this ultimate ontological mystery is blended out of the new construction of knowing grounded in transcendental reflection, which clearly distinguishes what can be known by the finite human self from what cannot. The self produces the transcendental grounds of knowing that enclose the finite and knowable sphere in a complete, self-​sufficient system of inferences from certain “intuitions” (perceptions) or conceptions. Kant establishes explicitly on a foundation of transcendental reflection this system, which is first articulated in the Cartesian project for a self-​certain modern philosophy. In a typically medieval perspective, by contrast, at least up until Scotus, the self, by reflecting itself into its source, actually dissolves the confines of its self-​containment. It recognizes itself as but an image of a greater, divine Self who comprehends and infinitely transcends it. But this higher instance is not and cannot be grasped by finite intellect—​except as Nothing. This reflection of itself into an all-​embracing “Nothing” is the experience through which all things come to show themselves as they truly are beyond the distorting lenses of finitude imposed on the knowing subject by the creature’s inherent limits. Performing this self-​reflection is how the creature rises up to the vision of God. Such vision is attained through self-​reflection leading to self-​abandon to God in a direction contrary to that taken by modern philosophy in its striving after autonomy and control over the world. In order to establish itself as self-​grounding, the modern scientific worldview had to be based on an ontology of purely finite beings that are known by a pure logic of exclusion (the so-​called law of the excluded middle)—​eventually just the digital system of binary distinctions. The finite needed to be disentangled from the infinite in order for properly

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128  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity scientific investigation in the modern sense to become possible. As long as the finite was invaded by the infinite as the ground of its being, it could not be definitively dealt with in strictly finite algorithms and so could not be exhaustively known. A rigorously scientific approach in the sense of modern science was precluded. Human thought remained suspended in a magical—​or at least an analogical—​universe. It remained without apodeictic foundations grounded in purely self-​validating premises that thought could verify on its own. Reason was still in need of something of the order of faith. The eclipse of knowing via the Divine Names was among the effects of the return, in its full amplitude, of Aristotelian logic to currency in the thirteenth century. Instead, the logic of saying something that is not contradictory and that excludes its opposite became the standard and norm for all significant expression.1 In this new paradigm, there is no longer any room for the ancient wisdom of the coincidence of opposites, or for the poetic a/​logic of a paradoxical Saying that transforms the sayer into an image and likeness of the divine, in accordance with the Neoplatonic mystical ascent to the One. Conceptual thinking gains ascendency and aims at saying univocally what everything, including God, is—​or, at least, that God is. Duns Scotus, in crucial ways, is the mastermind behind these developments. He forges the premises for the new logic-​ based conceptuality, and yet his own position is far subtler and more multivalent than the dominant scientific paradigm that eventually results from it. Whereas, for Kant, transcendental reflection invalidates and, in effect, ends metaphysics as a theoretical enterprise, Scotus envisages a new path for metaphysics, one along which metaphysics can affirm itself as a science.

1 Boulnois, Être et representation, 293–​302.

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21  Scotus’s Discovery of a New Path for Metaphysics—​Intensities of Being

For Aristotle, “metaphyics” as the science of the highest, most perfect being was literally “theology” (Metaphysics, Book Λ), although “metaphysics” was also the science of universal being or ontology (Books Γand E). Aristotle’s metaphysics as the science of beings in general (metaphysica generalis) was not transparently identical with metaphysics as the science of the eminent being (metaphysica specialis). This duplicity of the “onto-​ theological” constitution of metaphysics in Aristotle harbored a problem that became even more acute with the Christian notion of God as infinite being. It seemed impossible to bring finite and infinite being—​or being in general and the eminent being (God)—​together into a common frame and to think them together under a univocal concept. However, Scotus devised an original solution to this problem, a solution which proved revolutionary for the whole conception of metaphysics and its relation to the science (or wisdom) of theology. We find him groping his way toward it in passages such as the following: And the most perfect concept is reached by conceiving simply and in the highest degree every perfection through which, as if by description, we most perfectly know God. Nevertheless, a concept more perfect and yet simpler is possible for us in the concept of infinite being. This concept is simpler than the concept “good being”, “true being” or concepts of other, similar things because “infinite” is not like an attribute or property of being, or of that of which it is said. Instead, “infinite” signals an intrinsic mode of that entity, such that when I say “infinite being” I do not have a concept that like an accidental concept is composed out of the subject and a property. Rather, I have an essential concept of a subject in a certain grade of perfection, namely, infinity, just as “intense white” does not express the same thing as an accidental concept like “visible white.” Indeed, the intensity expresses an intrinsic grade of whiteness in itself. And so the simplicity of the concept “infinite being” is evident. (Ord. I, d.3, pt. 1, qq.1–​2, n.58)

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130  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity This simple distinction between a quality and a degree of being proves momentous. Rather than placing finite and infinite being alongside one another as qualitatively different objects of categorically different types of knowing, Scotus reconceives infinite being, or God, as a degree or intensity of being. This quantitative conception of infinite being enables Scotus to avoid separating divine from creaturely being. God is no longer a being outside of other beings and placed at the end of a causal chain of beings mounting to the highest instance of being, the First Being. God is rather an absolutely different degree of the same being that is immanently present in all beings. The individuation of divine being is thus no longer qualitative, consisting in a discrete being with distinct properties. There is no definable essential difference in being between God and the creature but rather a difference in the degree of intensity of being. This is still, nevertheless, an infinite difference, since God, and God alone, is infinite being. This novel conception preserves the absolute difference between Creator and creature, what is sometimes called “the Christian difference,”1 and at the same time it avoids turning the Creator into a being among others, simply the highest in the series. This innovation hangs together with what is most widely known as Scotus’s doctrine of the “univocity of being.” No longer is God “being” in some other sense than that which applies to creaturely beings, as Thomas Aquinas had maintained and worked out elaborately in his theory of the analogy of being (analogia entis). Thomas’s doctrine was designed to afford us some kind of access to what was in principle inaccessible. We cannot, according to his doctrine, know God’s being in itself, but we can know the being of the creatures that are effects of the divine being, the Supreme Being, their Cause. This gives us an “analogical” knowledge of God’s being (Summa Theologiae, I, Quaestio 12–​13). Still, for Thomas, God’s Being in itself, apart from its relations to us and to creaturely beings in general, lies beyond human ken. Duns Scotus fundamentally—​although still only formally—​changes this predicament. He admits that God in himself surpasses our understanding. However, he dismisses or ignores this dimension of divinity (in theoretical speculation) and opens a new dimension immanent to human conceiving and knowing, one in which there is a “formal” presence of unspecified being as such in everything that is—​in all beings whatsoever, including God. The sheer concept “being” makes being formally present to the human mind in an indistinct manner so that being is defined neither as finite nor as infinite. This formal or “intensional” dimension of being is, in effect, the element that human metaphysical science indwells and

1  David Burrell, “The Christian Distinction Celebrated and Expanded,” The Truthful and the Good: Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1996).

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Scotus’s New Path for Metaphysics  131 develops.2 However, following Scotus, William of Ockham will shift to an extensional approach to metaphysics that eventually erases this properly metaphysical dimension and makes scientific knowledge appear to be the opposite of metaphysics. Thenceforth science deals only with externally existing things and not with reflectively produced intensions. This will become glaringly clear with Kant, who explodes metaphysics as merely a pseudo-​science. But Scotus still envisaged the possibility and necessity of reinterpreting metaphysics as a science of intensional being. Intensional being is apprehended by (and only by) formal distinctions that are produced by reflection.

2  “Intension” designates the meaning, the properties, or intellectual content included in (or “intended” by) a concept, whereas “extension” delimits the set of entities that fall under it.

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22  Scotus’s Formal Distinction

Beyond the difference between different individuals, or numerically distinct things, Scotus recognizes also formal or intensional differences of conceptual content. He introduces the notion of “formal distinction,” or more literally “formal non-​identity” (non identitas formalis), in order to treat differences that are grounded in things themselves and so are not purely mental and yet are not differences between independently existing things. These differences depend on how the things are conceived or viewed. Nevertheless, they are not merely subjective differences. There is really something there to be discerned, even though it is not noticed until a certain way of conceiving it brings out a different aspect of the thing. These are differences that first come to light through the activity of the mind, and yet they already exist before the mind’s apprehension of them. They exist in things themselves (in res), but such things themselves are not wholly separable from their existing in and for subjects—​as modern phenomenology would later rediscover anew on its own terms. A stock example that is found in Avicenna (Metaphysics V.1) and runs throughout the tradition serves to illustrate this subtle sort of distinction called “formal.” Not only concrete things like horses, but also structural determinations like “horseness” (equinitas), can be objects of knowledge for our minds, given their powers of abstraction. We can clearly conceive of horseness, even though it is not another self-​standing thing different and separate from horses. Formulating the concept of horseness introduces a conceptual difference that brings out a more abstract level of the reality in question than we would otherwise have noticed—​or at least have focused. Whatever it is that all horses have in common (“the whatness of allhorse,” as Stephen Dedalus amusingly puts it in Joyce’s Ulysses) so that we are able to recognize them as horses can itself be treated conceptually as a kind of thing with at least a formal difference from any actual horse. These formal differences are in their own way as real as empirical individual horses, even though formalities (formalitates) such as “horeseness” do not exist as separate individuals. They are grounded in things but are first brought to light through thinking. Precisely this formal aspect of Scotus’s approach has determined the history and destiny of modern thought and civilization. Such thinking

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Scotus’s Formal Distinction  133 begins methodologically from the concept—​from the formal structure that the knower or consciousness imposes on its objects. This is Kant’s orientation in his critical philosophy, and the latter’s derivation from Scotus is clearly visible, as Honnefelder, among others, has rendered explicit and emphatic.1 The science of transcendentals, beginning with Scotus, is still Kant’s project centuries later, with the difference that Kant pursues it in the name of replacing metaphysics, whereas Scotus understands such science as the key to a new and true metaphysics. Scotus’s transcendentals, which consist in formal properties such as unity, goodness, and being, are supplemented or supplanted by Kant’s “pure concepts of the understanding” (the “categories”). In both cases, such forms are apprehended only as forms of knowing, but they are nevertheless constitutive of the reality of things as they are experienced. The idea of a formal reality of things that is really grounded in things but that is disclosed only by reflection can be traced forward to the semiology of Charles Sanders Peirce, who explicitly links his theory of “general terms” to Duns Scotus’s thought of a formal reality that is different from existence.2 The “common nature” of a thing (natura communis) does not exist as an individual, but it nevertheless precedes reflection, which discovers it as an essence (essentia) that is determined formally out of itself (formaliter ex se) independently of its being in existence. Such a “common nature” is an abstraction from immediately perceptible entities and entails the positing of a level of reality that is discerned only by the mind by which it is subjectively shaped and defined. Still, it is not purely arbitrary fantasy and invention but rather pertains to the reality of things as disclosed through their interaction with the mind.

1  Ludger Honnefelder, “Die ‘Transzendentalphilosophie der Alten’: Zur mittelalterlichen Vorgeschichte von Kants Begriff der Transzendentalphilosophie,” Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress, Memphis 1995, vol. 1, ed. Hoke Robinson (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995), 394–​407. 2 One place where Peirce acknowledges this debt is in the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vols. 1–​6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–​58), 228–​29, paragraph 6.328. The topic has generated voluminous discussion, some of which is reviewed by Gordon E.  Whitney, “Reason, Will and Belief: Insights from Duns Scotus and C. S. Peirce,” in Living Doubt: Essays concerning the Epistemology of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Guy Debrock and Menno Hulswit (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 137–​50.

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23  The Intensional Object of Onto-​ theology as Transcendental Science

Not the Thomistic metaphysical way of analogy (analogia entis), but rather Scotus’s refashioning of metaphysics as a transcendental science (scientia transcendens), opens the path that is followed by modern metaphysics and generally by the modern scientific enterprise. Reacting to the new science brought about by the thirteenth-​century reception of Aristotle and Islamic philosophy in its conflict with biblical revelation, Scotus makes metaphysics a self-​grounding and self-​limiting kind of knowing that no longer integrates or competes with revelation. Instead, metaphysics consists in a purely formal knowledge that is demonstrably true but limited to what the finite mind can grasp—​indeed to what it produces by its own means, in effect, to what Husserl called “intensional content” (“intentionaler Inhalt”). Ultimate truths for Scotus are beyond the range of reason in its state in this life. They are reserved, rather, for the divine Mind and for the blessed in the afterlife. In “this” (present) life, we have to concern ourselves only with truths of an order that is rationally or empirically verifiable by our finite minds. This becomes the modern path that science follows to Kant—​by whom science is deemed no longer compatible with metaphysics—​ and beyond to supposedly “post-​metaphysical” forms of thinking with Habermas.1 Without revelation, we are capable of knowing neither the sensible particularity (quiditas rei materialis) or singularity of things nor the whole of being as an undifferentiated totality (ens … secundum totam indifferentiam ad omnia).2 We can know only the abstract concept of a being in general that is present and presupposed as transcending all categories of being. This concept is produced by the mind and is limited in its validity to the mind’s own subjective way of construing the world. It is “transcendental”—​imposed by the mind—​rather than being a category 1 Jürgen Habermas, Nachmetaphysiches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), trans. William Mark Hohengarten as Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 2 Quotations are from the Prologue to Scotus’s Ordinatio I, d.3, q.3, n.124, www. logicmuseum.com/​wiki/​Authors/​Duns_​Scotus/​Ordinatio/​Ordinatio_​I/​D3/​Q2. Accessed 4/​25/​2017.

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Onto-theology as Transcendental Science  135 of being itself. Although Scotus remained, nevertheless, a staunch metaphysical realist, the anti-​metaphysical or nominalist potential of this fundamental and far-​reaching innovation would be fully exploited only a short time later, already by the logical empiricism of Ockham and his followers. This follow-​up to (and misprision of) Scotus was dominated by those who would dispense with any overt metaphysics and, eventually, even with God. Scotus’s knowledge of being in general and of common natures intrinsic to and produced by the mind provides a completely different basis for metaphysics from the knowledge of a first being (God) that founds Thomistic metaphysics. Thomas’s metaphysics hail from Aristotle’s theology, which starts from the knowledge of the first and perfect being. But Scotus’s metaphysics is no longer founded on the knowing of a first and most excellent being (God or substance). It is a first science only of a first concept or ground (ratio)—​a rational determination of being qua being (ens in quantum ens). Martin Heidegger aims to return to the primal thinking of being itself, but he accepts the reduction of metaphysics to merely conceptual, analytic knowledge passed down from Scotus through Kant. The early Heidegger developed his thesis about being in his 1916 Habilitationsschrift (Die Kategorien-​und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus) on a text believed at the time to be authored by Scotus but subsequently identified as the Grammatica speculativa of Thomas of Erfurt (d. 1304). In his quest for a worldly fundamental ontology, Heidegger reconfigured the conception of being in its ultimacy as the indeterminateness of a last determination (“Letztheitscharakter”) of all—​all that is anything, or that is at all. We can see in this thesis a foreshadowing of Heidegger’s formulation of ontological difference (“die ontologische Differenz”) in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927). Heidegger, who worked early and intensively on Scotus’s type of thinking, emphasizes the continuity between metaphysics and empirical science. According to Heidegger, the destiny of our late-​modern technological civilization was already inscribed in the logos-​ metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, which replaced the authentic thinking of being that had dawned with the pre-​Socratics. The two and a half thousand year history of metaphysics is based on the forgetting of Being as such and as distinct from separate, individual beings. Both types of (non-​)thinking—​ science and metaphysics—​forget being because both presume to be able to comprehend being itself by merely conceptual means. Yet Scotus’s metaphysics had no such pretensions. Even though he did begin working with a univocal concept of being, Scotus did not have the Hegelian pretension to comprehend all things through the concept. Concepts for him were not just adequate instruments of apodeictic knowledge. More deeply, they were, like everything else, gifts from a divine Giver. However, this latter perspective, in which words are seen as reflections of the divine Word, was not demonstrable by science, whether

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136  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity empirical or metaphysical, so it was not Scotus’s affair as a metaphysician. It was to be developed as poetic intuition and vision, however, by Dante—​and grandly—​in his own idiosyncratic style. Scotus eliminates the work of attempting to build understanding through similitude and assimilation to the divine—​in other words, knowledge by analogy. All that is left, then, is rather fideistic knowing of God by trust in revelation plus a rational metaphysical knowledge that consists in abstractly signifying an infinite Being that we are unable to think concretely. We have no natural knowledge of such separate being. Such knowledge will be possible only when we become supernaturally blessed in the life to come. This difference between mere abstract thinking of concepts and actual intuition of perceptions becomes stark, even rigid, in Scotus, and it reemerges as such in Kant’s rigorous dichotomy between concepts (Begriffe) or thoughts and percepts or “intuitions” (Anschauungen). We see the further consequences of Scotus’s thinking in Kant’s famous dictum that concepts without percepts are empty, while percepts without concepts are blind (or, in the most common English translation: “Thoughts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”).3 For Scotus, metaphysics is possible only as a formal, modal science of transcendent being, without objective intuition. For Kant, this means that metaphysics as a supposed knowledge of transcendent objects is not genuine knowledge at all. There is, however, a transcendental knowledge of the conditions of possibility of experience, and this is what Kant’s critical philosophy works out in depth and detail. However, already for Scotus, metaphysics had become merely a formal knowledge of transcendental concepts, in effect, a transcendental a priori knowledge of conditions of possibility of knowing, just as for Kant. God, or infinite Being, is the ground of all that is, without itself being knowable by humans. Even though we have no distinct, empirical perception of infinite Being, yet we know abstractly by logical inference that infinite being must be the condition of existence of all other beings. Scotus proves this at length in his Tractatus de primo principio, which recapitulates large sections of his Ordinatio and stands as his last and definitive formulation of his metaphysical theology.4

3 “Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind.” Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed., I, Pt. 2, I: Die transzendentale Logik. 4 Original Latin text in Abhandlung über das erste Prinzip, ed. Wolfgang Kluxen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974). English translation is available at: www.ewtn.com/​library/​THEOLOGY/​GODASFIR.HTM. Accessed 9/​ 30/​ 2017. The bilingual edition of Evan Roche, O.F.M., The De Primo Principio of John Duns Scotus (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1949) is still useful.

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24  Phenomenological Reduction and the Univocity of Being

The issue of how to fit God into metaphysics troubled Scholasticism and posed a major challenge to integrating the Greek metaphysical worldview with the biblical worldview based on revelation. Scotus finds a solution that, in effect, opens the way to modernity and its science, without denying the authority of Scripture concerning ultimate truth. He is enabled to do so chiefly by virtue of his formal method of considering his subject. He takes the manifest form that things or concepts are for us as the only object of knowledge that we can truly consider. He abstracts from what they may be in themselves beyond our ken. This anticipates the move that Kant later makes fully explicit with his distinction between appearances (Erscheinungen) and things-​in-​themselves (Dinge-​an-​sich). Our human, conceptual structure of receptivity is thereby erected into a condition of the possibility of knowing—​it becomes “transcendental.” We can know nothing except in the terms dictated by our noetic apparatus. Knowing this apparatus, therefore, gives us a certain a priori, universal knowledge concerning everything knowable (to us). Scotus’s teaching of the univocity of being entails that the concept of “being” applies to or is predicable of all beings, finite and infinite alike. Of course, this is true only for us, or for the being and beings that we can think and conceive. What being and beings may be beyond our conceptions, we cannot say; we can, at most, allow for such a mystery. This positions us at the source of knowing and of what is known rather than leaving us on the outside trying to get a handle on what is already given prior to and independently of us. Being and reality are redefined in terms that make us part of them and make them inconceivable without us.1 We can understand this as, in crucial respects, an anticipation of the phenomenological method that would be developed later by Husserl. After all, Scotus’s revolution in metaphysics (like Husserl’s in epistemology) consists in having introduced a formal method that outlines the

1  In this sense, Quentin Meillassoux, Après la finitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence (Paris: Seuil, 2006) qualifies modern philosophy en bloc as “correlationalism.”

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138  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity limits of the discipline. A glaring difference, nevertheless, is that Husserl employs his phenomenological method as a way of returning to things themselves (“den Sachen selbst”). He is trying to reverse the abstraction that scientific epistemology has introduced, with the result that we know things always only relative to our conceptual framings and systems. But the reality of things for the modern age that Husserl inhabits has become purely phenomenal. Manifest appearings of things as “phenomena” are things themselves for such an empirical worldview. This is not the case for the metaphysical worldview of the Middle Ages, with its infrastructure informed by Neoplatonism and monotheism. In Scotus’s and Husserl’s cases alike, there is an epistemological reduction to the manifestation of things in the event of knowing, in effect, a phenomenological reduction. Without denying the transcendent being of things, there is in either case a methodological decision to concentrate on just what is manifest to the knowing subject in experience or in thinking. Knowing is thereby enabled to separate strictly between the known and the unknown. Scotus’s orientation of knowing to a “formal” object is basically what makes the scientific revolution possible. Ironically, Husserl applies this formalizing move rigorously in order to resist the tendency of science to separate us from the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) that is the background necessary for lending our thought and lived experience their sense and meaning. Husserl’s is a self-​critical move that coerces scientific knowing to take account of its own entrapment in mere formality. His turn back to the “things themselves” is an attempt to exit from the merely formal reality that was ushered in by Duns Scotus’s determination to relate knowing to being in a univocal sense that is indistinctly worldly and divine, finite and infinite, accident and substance. Husserl can do this because modern thought takes for granted that there is no other being than phenomenal being so that in focusing purely on sensory phenomena thought is returning to things themselves. The reality of “being” with which Scotus as a thinker (and not as a believer) is concerned is the being that can be thought and conceived, a formal being, a being that is already formed by and for being known by a subject. It conforms to what Husserl treats as phenomenal being, being that is also always for a subject, since a “phenomenon” is inherently an appearing to a subject. From the usual modern epistemological viewpoint, there is no other being, no being that is not phenomenal, nothing that is metaphysically real. One will have to follow phenomenology forward to its so-​called “theological turn” in postmodern thinkers, with Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean-​Luc Marion, Jean-​Ives Lacoste, Jean-​Louis Chrétien, etc., in order to see it reopen in the direction of a reality that cannot be humanly conceived at all, but can only be divinely given.2 However, with 2  Dominique Janicaud, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Combas: L’Eclat, 1991). In English, see Dominique Janicaud et  al., Phenomenology and the

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Phenomenological Reduction  139 univocity, there is no longer any need to refer to any higher being or superior order of reality. Not that the phenomenal being that is referred to is fully known or even knowable. The unknowable depth of being is still there (at least for Scotus) within the sphere of immanence. But for purposes of science, it can be ignored and, in any case, has no proper language. It lurks as a penumbra of what all languages about objects cannot grasp or even discern.

“Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). For contextualization and commentary, see J. Aaron Simmons and Bruce Ellis Benson, The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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25  The Epistemological Turn in the Formal Understanding of Being

Historians of medieval philosophy outline a “second beginning” (after Plato and Aristotle) of metaphysics in the thirteenth century and particularly with Scotus, one that is “ontological” (and even epistemological, I wish to stress) rather than theological.1 This makes metaphysics a science rather than a type of wisdom. It moves from what is first known by us rather than from what is first in itself or in the order of being. Knowledge now proceeds from what is first in predication rather than in ontological rank. Metaphysics becomes a transcendental science focused finally on linguistic terms as instruments of knowing rather than on things themselves. This becomes especially clear and programmatic after Duns in the logic of William of Ockham.2 What Scotus proffers is already a form of critical philosophy based on self-​certainty secured through self-​limitation. Already in Scotus (and fully and explicitly in Ockham), our knowledge of being is fundamentally disjunctive (A or not-​A) rather than holistic. Being is understood formally as simply what does not contradict being (cui non repugnant esse in rerum natura). Being is understood modally as neither actual nor not-​actual, but simply as entailing no contradiction of reality (ens [est hoc], cui non repugnant esse).3 Duns’s is a formal way of seeing things, but what he sees is not the less real for all that. In fact, it enables a whole new dimension of reality to be focused and expressed. The “content of the form,” so to speak, opens up to view in a way that was to be differently explored and exploited poetically by Dante. For Duns Scotus, knowing becomes recognized as constitutive of things—​if not absolutely in themselves, then at least as they appear to us in the world. In bringing out the subjective angulation of disclosure of what things are in the world, Duns is also in step with Dante’s metaphorical method of revealing the cosmos and the truth of all things in universal history. Dante, too, writes subjective perception or “formal” consideration into his poetic epiphany. The subjectivity of what he presents as 1 Boulnois, Être et représentation, 471–​79. 2 Honnefelder, Woher kommen wir?, 111. 3  Ordinatio IV, d.1, q.2, n.8 (cf. IV, d.8, q.1, n.2).

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The Epistemological Turn  141 nonetheless divine revelation flows from the same source of insight as that from which Duns Scotus draws his recognition of the “formal” character of things as they are accessed through human knowing and experience. Merely formal differences perceived from different viewpoints are not independently existing individuals; they do not exist in a subjectless world of objective entities. Nevertheless, these formal differences make a world of difference for Scotus, as for Dante. The tragic irony of modern intellectual history is that, subsequent to the application of Ockham’s razor, this formal world of possibilities is going to be demoted to the status of an empty metaphysics or a mere fiction by the “progress” of the modern world toward a pure positivism of strictly objective entities. This operation begins with nominalism in the Middle Ages, and it will eventually wind up in the completely digitalized universe of our own age of globalization. What is retained from Scotus’s world of possibilities with real ontological roots is only a purely positive grid of objectively defined abstractions. This misprision cuts away the theological grounding of the real. The most original pathbreakers of this modern world, notably Franciscan theologians such as Scotus and Ockham, had something entirely different and even opposite to this in mind. They were contemplating the unconditioned freedom of the divine Will and the consequent contingency of the natural world. This conception entails the analogous freedom of the human mind and will self-​reflectively generating a reality of their own creation. This unconditioned freedom of the individual mind and will that the Franciscan philosopher-​theologians discovered and opened up in its visionary potential was, for them, still exercised in the image of a divine Creator. But it could also be captured and made the slave of mechanisms for controlling human thought and action by conglomerate powers that would result eventually, in our own times, in an asphyxiatingly managerial, technocratic culture. Such is the formal dimension of reality that Scotus opens to view in metaphysical terms. Dante, through his work with the imagination, opens a realm of pure form that is similarly invented or discovered by human intellect. Yet, it is none the less real for all that. It is a realm of free spiritual expression. These domains of formal reality are realms of representation, whether of abstract entities or of poetic imaginings. But, in both cases, with Duns and with Dante, they call to be understood on the basis of a kind of quasi-​rational faith in which reason transcends, or at least suspends, a purely or restrictively objective self-​understanding—​and does so on critical-​rational grounds. As such, these purely formal realms are reality-​bearing traces of a higher order of metaphysical being and even of divine spirit. For Duns, that higher realm is the object only of a practical (not a theoretical or speculative) theology and of a purely abstract metaphysics. Human reason is sufficient unto itself and autonomous in the secular sphere. Dante, too, is a proponent of the autonomy of the secular order,

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142  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity but he never forgets that this very autonomy is itself a reference to—​and a vestige or repetition of—​divine autonomy. Dante strives in every way to reconnect the finite with the infinite. He develops the imaginative means of doing so through his investment in metaphor as expressing a subjective transformation of all things and of our relation to reality itself in experience. Duns does not himself forget infinite being, but he furnishes the means by which those who were to concern themselves only with positive, finite being would do so. Duns’s concept of the univocity of being makes both the finite and the infinite thinkable in a single concept that gives humans apparent conceptual control over the other (the metaphysical) realm that the Paradiso obsessively recognizes as ineffable. Univocity fosters a forgetting of this unassimilable otherness of being. It forges the conceptual tools for ignoring the ungraspable mystery of being at the ground of all beings and thus for treating finite being, which is but a re-​presentation, as an absolute form of being and as sufficient unto itself.

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26  Signification of the Real and an Autonomous Sphere for Representation

For Duns Scotus, God remains inconceivable in concrete terms by finite human beings. He can, nevertheless, be signified by language in a proper concept. This can be brought about through a concept that God himself has instituted and given to humans to be known through biblical revelation, but it can also be achieved through an abstract metaphysical concept such as that of “infinite being.” God’s nature is not concretely conceivable for humans, but it can nevertheless be truly signified by such a concept. Scotus eliminates analogy (we have no approximate knowledge of what God is like) and allows for only direct, univocal signification of God. He admits the inadequacy of our concepts to really and concretely conceive the nature of the Infinite. There is no commonly conceivable reality or ratio that applies to both God and creatures (“in nulla realitate conveniunt,” Ordinatio I, d.8, q.3, n.82). However, proper conceptual knowledge is not necessary for our being able to signify God beyond what we can actually understand. In De interpretatione (1.4–​6), Aristotle laid down the principle that words are the signs of thoughts, which are the signs of things. But the new semantic paradigm introduced by Scotus’s Franciscan predecessor Roger Bacon (1214–​92) revised this traditional Aristotelian-​Boethian model. For Bacon, signs such as words signify directly things, not their concepts or mental images. Even without our necessarily being able to conceive things accurately and completely, the signs we employ intend to signify things that we cannot adequately conceive—​like infinite Being. The direct relation of the sign to the res in the new semantic paradigm enables God to be signified as infinite being, even though there is no adequate way for finite humans to understand or conceive him—​and no common ratio between God and creatures. In fact, Scotus freely admits this lack of any common measure. The univocal concept of Being that is common to God and creatures in our intention corresponds to no common property in reality (“nihil unius rationis in re,” Ord. I  d.8, n.138–​40; cf. I, d.31, n.29–​31). Precisely in this regard, it is a purely “formal” object. Scotus initiates a strong dissociation of signification from intellection as two distinct operations of thought. By separating what is the object merely of a semantic code from what is actually thought through a

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144  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity metaphysical concept, he creates a sphere of pure representation. It has many powerful applications that will not cease to disclose themselves in astonishing and fantastic ways—​ eventually producing quarks and quantums, supernovae and white dwarfs, antimatter and superstrings—​ throughout the coming ages of scientific invention. We can easily see what motivates such a secular recasting of knowledge. The human mind gains complete autonomy in a secular sphere of its own self-​defined, formal objects or concepts. The mind can forget its concern for the otherness of reality as such and can focus simply on the sphere that it defines for itself and manages through its own inventions in its own proper domain. This procedure evinces the power of self-​ reflection for creating a coherent system of concepts—​which is the basis of any modern science. Scotus dismantles the analogical thinking that Thomas Aquinas designed in order to approach, in an at least quasi-​scientific manner, a wholly other reality, of which we can never have proper, unmetaphorical, unanalogical intelligence.1 Scotus replaces the doctrine of analogy and Dionysius’s three ways (affirmative, negative, mystical) by three types of transcendentals corresponding to three degrees of knowing God.2 This radically alters the meaning of the divine Names. The first degree comprises Names such as Good, Infinite, and Wise, which are pronounceable and knowable, but not revealed. The second degree is the Tetragrammaton, which is revealed, but not conceivable or pronounceable by humans. It is imposed by God and is a proper, revealed divine Name, but it remains a foreign language for God’s human creatures. We do not understand it. There is also a third degree, a common Name for God: “Being,” as revealed in Exodus 3:14, is abstractly conceivable by humans and properly applicable in its infinite mode to God. It is per se an adequate concept of God, but it can only be imperfectly conceived by humans. By means of these distinctions, Scotus avoids the paradoxes typical of negative theology in the tradition reaching from Dionysius the Areopagite through Maimonides to Aquinas and Eckhart. He avoids the radical anonymity of God by distinguishing between the origin through imposition of the Names and their intended sense. We do not need to be able to understand its meaning in order to employ a divine Name. Thus we can name God, although we do not know his own being or essence. Scotus also avoids thereby the typical Scholastic homonymy of all the divine Names. In the Divine Names tradition, Good, One, Being, True, etc., all

1 Wolfgang Pannenberg, Analogie und Offenbarung: Eine kritische Untersuchung zur Geschichte des Analogiebegriffs in der Lehre von der Gotteserkenntnis (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2007), 164–​ 65, sifts the far-​ reaching significance of this upheaval. 2  Cf. Boulnois, Être et représentation, 320–​25.

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Signification of the Real  145 mean the same with regard to God irrespective of the formal distinctions between them as objects of the intellect. For Scotus, even though all Names refer to the one, indivisible Being of God, they are understood under various ratios by the finite intellect and so have different meanings. Finally, the primacy accorded to “Being” as the divine Name par excellence makes the object—​but not the intellectual content—​of theology coincide with the object of metaphysics and of our possible conceptualizations. A new unity and order is brought to human knowing even of God by defining human knowing’s range such that it no longer has to confront the absolute difference of the divine but can handle everything with adequate univocal concepts, even without always having concrete intuitive knowledge of what they mean. Of course, any treatment of God as an object is pure artifice. In this regard, Scotus is actually still a strong proponent of God’s ineffability, as long as we refer to the act of trying to comprehend him and not simply to the sign representing him.3 So Scotus does not eliminate negative theology at the level of the conception of God, which remains impossible, but only at the level of the signification of God, which is possible, even without our understanding what is signified by “God” or by perfections such as “being” or “oneness” or “goodness” as attributed to God. According to Scotus, created intellect comes to rest only in contemplating God as Being in the mode of infinity, which is the most perfect concept of God that we can conceive (Ord. I, d.2, q.2, n.147). Even though this concept in its infinite mode is not really understandable or concretely thinkable by finite human intellect, God can nevertheless be named and signified by it. What Scotus has done, in effect, is to erase the mysticism of the Divine Names that was cultivated in Neoplatonic and Patristic tradition. The Divine Names are no longer a privileged or even a possible path to the intellectual experience of God. Naming and language are no longer accorded ontological or gnoseological significance. They are merely instrumental to technically correct procedures of designating and denoting. Genuine knowledge in the modern age is empirical and experimental and entirely dissociated from any linguistic auras. Names are no longer considered to be infused with symbolic meaning and miraculous potency. The apophatic, negative way of theurgically uniting with God by divination through contemplation of the divine Names, and by an exercise of intuitive intellect beyond the scope, or at least the control, of scientific concepts, is abandoned. It is left to be taken up and reinvented as a new type of verbal magic in poetry from Dante to Mallarmé. The “alchemy of the word” (“l’alchimie du verbe”) (Rimbaud) for French symbolists harks back to pre-​modern science. 3  Reportatio parisiensis in Allan B.  Wolter and Oleg V.  Bychkov, ed. and trans., John Duns Scotus. The Examined Report of the Paris Lecture: Reportatio I-​A, Latin Text and English Translation. vol. 2 (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2008), I, d.22, q.1, n.12.

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27  Objective Representation—​Beyond Naming and Desiring the Divine

This revolution of paradigms entails also abandoning the priority of the Good in Dionysius the Areopagite in order to make Being the proper Name of God and give it priority. God is thenceforth known not primarily through beneficent divine operations and a corresponding transformation of the human knower by the desire for the Good. Instead, God is objectively represented according to his proper Being (as humanly conceived). This is the major liability bequeathed by Scotus to modernity—​ the shift into dealing with representations rather than directly with reality. Formerly, dealing with the real involved inextricably also the affective reality of a subject. But science demands abstracting from such subjective affect. What Scotus started would become fully evident only much later in the seventeenth century. The rise of experimental science would consolidate this sea change from the medieval gnoseological framework based on analogy—​a relational knowing by means of participation—​to the new episteme based on objective representation.1 A direct mirror relation of identity between entities is the basis of this epistemology geared to the efficacious manipulation of things rather than to transforming oneself in conformity with the ideals of Truth and Being. The practice of self-​expropriation in the image of the Infinite—​as in the spiritual quests of antiquity and the Middle Ages—​is abandoned. This is certainly a catastrophic loss and is sometimes recognized and portrayed as such. But there are also gains. Scotus prepares the way for Spinoza’s affirmative metaphysics as non-​discursive and as wholly distinct from theology and from any other form of representation by a Logos.2 This is what proves so unacceptable to Milbank and company, for whom revelation, as in the Bible, comes essentially in and through the Word. The erasure of linguistic mediation 1  Incisive angles of approach to this epochal epistemological shift are outlined by Johannes Hoff, The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013)  building on Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 2  Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 63–​67, focuses Spinoza’s derivation from Scotus.

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Objective Representation  147 leads also to scientific positivism, which claims to investigate things directly, without any recourse to discursive traditions but simply on the evidence of things themselves. Of course, “things” here means empirical things appearing to the senses, and even this definition of the elements of an ontology is not free of concealed linguistic presuppositions (recall section 2). Nevertheless, Scotus opens a space for experiential and experimental, yet non-​linguistic, mysticism that also inspires profoundly apophatic innovations and development in the modern age. His concept of haecceitas or “thisness” intends a singularity that is not accessible to linguistic-​conceptual articulation. Movements of affective piety beginning in the fourteenth century will fill in this space with diverse expressions of ineffably singular experience.3 The definitively anti-​theological consequences of Scotus’s erasure of analogy are drawn only by his successors, who eliminate contemplation of the divine. The tendency of the Radical Orthodoxy, as spearheaded by Milbank and Pickstock, to blame Scotus for the modern eclipse of God and theology can in this respect be corrected—​or at least counterbalanced—​ by following the detailed and precise historical analysis of Boulnois. Boulnois appreciates the genuinely theological passion driving Scotus, even though Scotus renders metaphysical and physical science completely autonomous from theology. It remains, nonetheless, true that in the wake of Scotus there are no longer any means of constructing a dynamic kind of interactive knowing of the divine through analogy. There is no longer any symbolic order connecting metaphysics and revelation. Analogical and metaphorical theology have been undermined. The supposedly scientific, univocal knowledge of God for early moderns like Francisco Suárez (1548–​1617) is purely metaphysical in a merely objective sense that Kant would definitively show to be untenable. Concrete knowing through figure and open-​ended, proliferating image and metaphor comes to be viewed no longer as a gift from God but rather as a purely human production. This reconfiguration is determining for the whole cast of modern thinking, and it grounds the great reproach of Milbank against Scotus.4 The dissociation between the divine gift of his revealed—​but not understood—​Name and the human concepts that can be rationally elaborated and metaphysically contemplated, yet without theurgical efficacy or communication with divinity itself, is the fateful

3 Bernard McGinn, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–​ 1550) (New  York: Crossroad, 1998). Andrew LaZella, The Singular Voice of Being: Duns Scotus and Ultimate Difference (New  York: Fordham University Press, 2019)  demonstrates far-​ reaching logical consequences. 4  On gift as fundamental to the nature of theological knowing, see John Milbank, “Can a Gift Be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic,” Modern Theology11/​ 1 (1995): 119–​61.

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148  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity legacy of Duns Scotus. This effectively inaugurates the modern and scientific age of thought in which theology is disconnected from human concept-​formation and the inventive making of metaphors. Before Scotus, the making of concepts and metaphors could be understood as inherently theological, as participating in divine creativity. Human words were naturally understood as reflections or as sparks animated by the divine Word or Logos. Dante still understands language emphatically as divine gift. However, Dante will prove also in key ways to share and integrate the new secular outlook developed philosophically by Scotus. And even Scotus himself still frames his masterwork, De primo principio, with prayers to the Lord God, Dominus Deus noster, to grant him to believe and know and expound (“mihi ea credere, sapere ac proferre concedat”).5 In fact, each of its four chapters begins with an address to God, and the treatise concludes with effusions of praise for divinity, inscribing the investigation into a God-​directed discourse. Scotus, too, recognizes science as God’s gift, even in giving it a rational foundation independent of theological grounding. The thrust of his work as a whole, nevertheless, relegates prayer to another register, one of willing, separate from knowing. Whereas Aquinas and Albert had attempted to integrate the new Aristotelian rational science with theology, Duns no longer deems this to be possible. He respects the internal coherence of philosophy and denies that natural reason has any need of a supernatural supplement. Reason is fully sufficient within its own domain and perceives nature likewise as self-​sufficient. Theology, for Scotus, is simply another discourse that has its own positive justification in Scriptural revelation. Theology’s truth is not reached through a negative (apophatic) dialectic in which natural reason would become aware of its own limits and insufficiency.6 This latter, negative approach to knowing has made a comeback in postmodern times, for example, with Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics (Negative Dialektik, 1966)  and with Emmanuel Levinas’s abjection in facing the Other (Totalité et infini, 1961). Negation stands at the origin also of French post-​structuralist thinking of excess (Bataille, Nancy, and others).7 And in this respect Dante is much closer to postmodern experience in registering the inadequacy and insufficiency (“questa disaggualianza,” XV.83) of his own natural being in Paradise. Scotus’s emphasis on the sufficiency of human reason in its own domain, 5 Scotus, De Primo Principio, 2. 6  Particularly the Commentary on the Sentences, where Scotus stages a dialogue between a philosopher and a theologian, demonstrates this. See also the Prologue to his Ordinatio, First Part: “On the Necessity of Revealed Doctrine.” 7 Hent de Vries brings together these versions of contemporary quasi-​negative theology in Theologie im Pianissimo: Zur Aktualität der Denkfiguren Adornos und Levinas (Kampen, The Netherlands: J. H. Kok, 1989), trans. Geoffrey Hale as Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

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Objective Representation  149 in contrast, enables its decoupling from revelation and theology and therewith the dawn of the modern scientific age.

The Good as Sought through Will without Intellect—​Subjectivity In modern culture, the ineluctable complement of objective, scientific representation is a will operating without intellectual insight or any guiding vision of truth. Only its own self-​posited ends and purposes can orient it and serve as values for it. The will is no longer oriented by rational desire for the Good as such, even though it may willfully seek concordance with a higher reality or Will. Duns does not give up on the desire for the Good and for God as fundamental to the orientation of human existence, but he removes them from the quest of the intellect for knowledge of truth and of the Cause of the universe. Instead, he assigns impulses to seek the good to the realm of ethics and to the practice of charity. Desire for the good belongs exclusively to the jurisdiction of the will and communicates with the divine only through commands supposedly known by revelation. Their connection with reason is thenceforth severed. Nature, too, like reason, is thereby released into its autonomy. Human “good will” still reasons and finds grounds for its actions, but its goodness is generated self-​reflexively from itself and from its own willing of the good. It is no longer essentially determined by reason, as in the Thomistic tradition. Will does not need to be informed and motivated externally by rational discernment of what is good in itself. The will itself now finds reasons and uses them, making them good rather than simply obeying their intrinsic nature as radiating the light of the real and true. The will’s goodness is no longer rooted in the cosmos. Will is itself the origin of the good rather than merely a faculty of choosing what is already in and of itself good on purely rational and natural grounds. The new age of the will that is good in itself and that leads eventually to the Kantian morality of the autonomous good will is born. With it is born the fact-​value split that cleaves modernity into the dualism of free subjects, on the one hand, and an alienated world of mere matter, on the other. In an attempt to forge an alternative, Henri de Lubac (1896–​1991) developed a theology based on the natural desire for the supernatural.8 This notion is the antithesis of Duns’s thinking that so marked the modern era.9 Duns makes reason sufficient and incontestable in its own nature and immanent sphere and thereby grants a license to human, apparently self-​grounding, reflection to dominate the world by its own natural and rational powers. 8  Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel. Études historiques (Paris: Aubier-​Montaigne, 1946). 9  John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

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150  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity Even though Dante, too, allows for an autonomous secular sphere, he nevertheless turns in constant tension toward a supernatural sphere that secular reason strives to emulate. Reason has no objective, scientific means of access to this other reality, but Dante nevertheless activates and intensifies his subjective and poetic efforts to approach and conform to it intellectually as an ideal. Dante understands, at least implicitly, through his imagination, that theology has to go beyond its fixed, dogmatic representations of the other world in order to preserve its ability to connect with the real spiritual order in a dynamic, existential relationship. This is the dimension that Kierkegaard calls “subjectivity” and brings to full expression in his radical contestation of the Enlightenment paradigm of autonomous, self-​grounding science, with its secular rationality. That secular paradigm for Kierkegaard was most fully achieved in the Hegelian System. Kierkegaard’s subjectivity witnesses existentially to a passion for the infinite and transcendent. Dante first discovers this radical subjectivity through his realization of the objective inaccessibility of any properly divine reality and truth. Up against this impasse, Dante forces open a secular realm for individual expression in relation to the inexpressible. Scotus, facing the same impasse, designs the system of autonomy for free conceptual invention within the sphere of our empirical and objective reality, cordoning off the higher metaphysical reality as a matter for ethics and charitable action. This becomes the founding charter for modern science and its mechanistic worldview, on one side, and for subject-​centered, eventually liberal ethics, on the other, complemented by an optional fideistic theology. The other route foreshadowed, instead, by Dante opens the way to a poetic understanding of the cosmos by subjective means of expression such as symbol and metaphor and to humanities disciplines as modes of interpreting every aspect of reality as engaging personal existence.

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28  Conceptual Production of “Objective” Being—​The Way of Representation

The new paradigm prepared for and introduced by Duns Scotus is one of representation. The theory of representation turns away from the imponderables of Being itself and its incomprehensibility in the Dionysian tradition toward “objective” being: this means intensional being, or being as an object for the intellect. Objective being is being that is conceived by the intellect under some determinate aspect or ratio and is not simply indicated vaguely and indeterminately. Paradoxically, “objective” originally means being an object for a subject, the opposite of existing independently of the mind, which is the meaning that “objective” takes on in common currency in modern times once this origin is forgotten. The formal, objective point of view forged by Scotus is thenceforth treated simply as the way things are. Science, consisting in formal conceptual schemas fabricated by the mind, is taken to describe the true reality of things. The metaphysical dimension of the Other that cannot be conceived is erased, and the world as such is simply identified with this conceptual production that can be called “objective being.” This reductive common sense based on objective, empirical reality is, in essence, what the phenomenological movement rebels against. Phenomenology aims to restore the reality of lived experience of phenomena as they appear to subjective consciousness in all their sensory appearance, even if not necessarily in their transcendence and mystery. Nonetheless, the reconceiving by objective science of all reality through its own categories of representation is immensely empowering for the whole human apparatus of knowing, which becomes a comprehensive system of self-​reflection. Although the intellect produces its own objects, they are still intended by Scotus to correspond to real things (res) outside the intellect. Scotus is still a metaphysical realist. But the immediate objects of intellection are produced by the active intellect rather than being received directly from the things themselves. Aristotle has been preempted here by Avicenna. The corporeal ground of knowing has been upstaged by a more direct spiritual ground and cause, one in which the object of knowing now inheres as a formal, intensional object in a knowing subject. The incipient severance of formal knowing of intensional conceptual contents from knowing and unknowing of reality in

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152  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity its absoluteness and otherness becomes much sharper after Scotus, and it ushers in the fully modern paradigm of representation. In this paradigm, the mind is trapped in a world of representations that are always only representations of other representations and can never break out of this prison house of reflecting mirrors into direct contact with another reality. The fateful consequences of this epistemological predicament of self-​enclosure within representation are played out pathetically, for example, following Descartes, in the tragic theatre of Racine (Bérénice, Andromaque, Phèdre, etc.).1 Scotus’s own theory of concepts, however, is not yet a pure representationalism because his concepts are still grounded in real things.2 The relation of subject and object in Scotus is still correlational rather than ontologically oppositional.3 He comes before the typically modern alienation of the subject from the world and the famous fact/​value split.

The Paradigm of Representation and Dante’s Alternative Version Dante enthusiastically receives the new empowerment by representation in all its self-​reflexive potential. Yet he does not effectively cut off or occult its connection with real being. He does not take representation as sufficient unto itself, but rather only as analogically revealing true and ultimate being. He incorporates the self-​reflexive powers of representation into a larger paradigm governed by analogical imagination. Objective, scientific knowing is not “absolute knowing” for him, as it would come to be more clearly in the modern age. This objectively representational knowing reaches its most reductive stage in twentieth-​century logical positivism, for which even the absolute knowing proffered by Hegel’s science of wisdom was unintelligible nonsense. Such conceptual shifts are not necessarily once and for all. Essentially the same shift as we are studying in medieval Scholasticism can be traced centuries later in the turn of Renaissance art and architecture to a subject-​ centered “linear perspective” making space a mathematizable realm dominated by the eye of a self-​reflective “I” (Hoff, The Analogical Turn).4 It is reenacted yet again in the transition from a Renaissance gnoseology based on affinities between things to the “classical” epistemology of 1  I develop this interpretation in “Hermeneutic Catastrophe in Racine: The Epistemological Predicament of 17th Century Tragedy,” Romanische Forschungen 105 (1993): 315–​31. 2 Honnefelder, Johannes Duns Scotus: Denker auf der Schwelle vom mittelalterlichen zum neuzeitlichen Denken, 14. 3 “Correlational” is used here in an ontologically deeper sense than that employed by Meillassoux in Après la finitude. 4  Deeper in the background here stands Hans Belting, Florenz und Bagdad: Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks (Munich: Beck, 2008), trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider as Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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Conceptual Production of “Objective” Being  153 identity inaugurated by Descartes, with his postulate of the self-​reflective identity of the subject as cogito (Foucault, Les mots et les choses). Knowing becomes representation in the age of Scotus, and Dante, too, works with this momentous paradigm shift. However, for Dante, all knowing is still beholden to a theological gift, and this gift can be known and made one’s own only in prayer and supplication—​or in prophetically inspired creative poetic activity. Human knowing of the divine, and even of the truly real, can be approached only approximatively and conjecturally through the representations of the imagination. For Dante the poet, representation, even when recognized as a human production, is still marked as ultimately an endowment of a divine Giver. Representation is only a special manifestation of a paradigm of knowledge as revelation that is much wider in scope and that stands on a higher ground of truth. This is patently the case especially for Dante as prophetic poet. Revelation certainly remained a superior form of knowing for Scotus, too, but he nevertheless pried it loose from objective scientific knowing by the finite, rational faculties of the human mind, which were placed thenceforth under the regime of representation. For Scotus, the immediate object of human knowing as objective being (esse objective) is a represented being, and this being is actively produced by the active intellect. Paradoxically (for modern ears), “objective” being is actually generated by an epistemological subject rather than standing as the ummediated presence of an external object. “Objective” designates literally and etymologically something thrown (iactus) in front of (ob) a conscious subject. Scotus develops a line of thought, continuing from Roger Bacon and Henry of Ghent, tearing the domain of the objects of thought away from natural causality and translating it into an intelligible realm of formal entities. The “objective” realm is separated from the natural, worldly realm of efficient causality. A purely formal realm of intensional objects is conceived according to certain ratios that are considered to be really in things, but their mode of being in the res and in its representation in the intellect is no longer the same. Scotus annuls the (Aristotelian) communication of the sensible form or “species” from the material object to the mind and substitutes (following Avicenna) an imitative copying or reproduction of it by the intellect. Scotus therewith “lays the theoretical foundation for the new paradigm of the formal object in modern thought starting from Suárez.”5 Knowledge is now produced not directly by the object to which the mind is receptive but by the mind itself through its faculty of representation. Such “knowledge” is an interior word or concept, a representation produced by and for the knower of the object known. For Scotus himself, the mental representation is still intrinsically connected with the real thing: it is a trace that expresses the thing through a relation of partial

5 Boulnois, Être et représentation, 94.

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154  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity resemblance. Yet the representation, as formal object, has a very different mode of being from the material thing or res: it is intelligible and spiritual, a product of the self-​reflective mind. The formality of the object is mentally fashioned and therefore is not received, not “phantasmatic” being—​a sensible species received by perception. Such phantasmatic being, gathered from elsewhere, does, in effect, in our present state, for Scotus, still guide our fashioning of formal objects (Boulnois, Être et representation, 94), but the latter are ontologically independent, being transparently products of our own mental reflection. Certainly, some form of mental image as representation is already found in Thomas Aquinas and in Henry of Ghent, but Scotus makes representation a process of reproduction rather than of reception. It is a real production by the intellect distinct from reception of sensible phantasms (species). This opens the way to modernity—​the metaphysical modernity of Suárez, but also the poetic modernity inaugurated by Dante and leading to Vico, in which imagination is not abandoned as a way of knowing. In either case, the modern relation to reality passes by way of self-​reflexive, humanly defined constructs. Momentously, the new approach to knowing as reproductive representation originates here also with Dante. Dante adumbrates it in his treatises, and he develops it in his poetic works especially through their implicit theory of art. However, according to Dante’s alternative version, representational knowing is not reduced to univocal concepts but proceeds rather by metaphor—​even metaphor for the Infinite and Incommensurable. Poetic expression of a higher reality than the empirical becomes the vocation particularly of theological imagination. This other route for representation, with its self-​reflexive productions as pursued by Dante, leads not to seeming mastery of the material universe through the grid of scientific concepts but rather toward the imagination of other worlds including higher, divine, and spiritual worlds. Dante’s self-​reflexive imagination raises questions concerning the relation of all humanly attainable knowledge to theology and revelation. His answers share much in common with Scotus’s because they are both creatively reacting to the same intellectual and cultural crisis. But there are also deeply consequential divergences owing largely to the very different aims of scientific analysis versus poetic vision. My own view, which I propose as deeply aligned with Dante’s outlook, is that we cannot adequately interpret this new realm generated by self-​reflective work (whether of conceptual thought or of poetic imagination) without using the resources of theology. However, theology here must be understood as not just a product of representation through an exercise of human imagination, but also as its creative source in the mind or self-​understanding of God.6 This

6 God’s own knowledge of himself is the primary sense of “theology” for Aquinas in Summa Theologica Ia, q.1. Cf. Ia, q.14.

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Conceptual Production of “Objective” Being  155 source, of course, surpasses human comprehension, but it is revealed in the imaginative process itself as an experience and enactment open to and striving after infinity. Confrontation with the Incommensurable, as nothing that can be humanly grasped, is embraced as an essentially constitutive and eminently creative moment necessary in order to interpret the whole of our self-​reflexively generated reality. Theology, so conceived, is such a self-​ reflectively generated discourse, but one that imaginatively struggles to think beyond its own limits and call them into question. Such theology becomes self-​critical and rejects every finite concept of the Infinite as idolatrous. As a self-​subverting discourse, such theology is negative or “apophatic.”

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29  From Logical (Dis)Analogy to Imaginative Conjecture versus the Forgetting of Being

This apophatic or negative theology takes on a new sort of pertinence in Dante’s historical context of crisis concerning the metaphysical realm of revealed truth. Relation to a purportedly higher world involves analogy, but also dis-​analogy. This holds for Dante, just as it holds for Dionysius (the Pseudo-​Areopagite) and for the whole Dionysian tradition of apophatic mystical discourse. God’s own proper being is inaccessible to natural reason. There is in this predicament already an epistemic break. It gives Dante poetic license and prophetic freedom to reinvent, in his own very personal terms, the other worlds of Christian damnation, purgation, and salvation. Yet, at the same time, Dante solemnly maintains that his poem is true prophetic revelation.1 Dante recognizes the mediation of imaginative representation as necessary in order to reveal the other world of the divine. Our human predicament as apophatic—​our existing in relation to an unsayable Other—​issues in free, creative, imaginative expression of this existential condition. Dante retains the truth that genuine knowing is possible only on the basis of our existential involvement and is not purely objective knowing. Duns, too, realizes that our knowing of God is possible only through charitable relations and actions, but he also defends a knowledge of finite things as rationally grounded without necessary reference to the infinite. This furnishes the basis for scientific knowing—​yet only at the price of forgetting the totality of the Infinite, the Cause in which all exists, and thus also of forgetting Being as such. Duns’s univocal concept of Being renders eminently possible, if not inevitable, a forgetting of infinite Being as something concretely experiential, and this forgetting itself is then forgotten rather than retained as the final and definitive revelation delivered by finite being and its history. Dante, in contrast, remembers this existential condition of inadequacy, which he calls “disaggualianza” (Paradiso XV.83). He acknowledges programmatically this incorrigible, necessary forgetting at the core of his paradisiacal experience as enframing the 1 I pursue this train of thought in “Dante and the Secularization of Religion through Literature,” Chapter 1 of Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), 9–​42.

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(Dis)Analogy and Imaginative Conjecture  157 entire poem in Paradiso I.7–​9 (“nostro intelletto si profonda tanto /​che dietro la memoria non può ire”) and in Paradiso XXXIII.94–​96, where it is called “letargo.” Just such a forgetting comes to pass as the “concealment of unconcealing” that Heidegger recognizes as dominating the whole history of Being. This forgetting, which he calls “metaphysics,” is what all his thinking strives so titanically to overcome. Dante, like Scotus, is on the path of the dissolution of the medieval doctrine of allegory in face of the newly discovered radical subjectivity of human knowing. Meister Eckhart (1265–​1329), another exact contemporary, likewise uses analogy as a way that makes expression of the divine only a subjectively mediated metaphor for what cannot be objectively known and expressed without becoming idolatrous. All beings are immediately related to God, the infinite. The ownmost being of anything is an objectively unknowable mystery, like God.2 Symbolic thinking flourishes in the age subsequent to Duns Scotus, but it is not objectively grounded so much as a human and subjective way of construing things. It is, in Nicholas of Cusa’s vocabulary, conjecture.3 Cusanus will be among the first to fully recognize and assimilate the new episteme.4 A conjecture is not just an arbitrary construction: it aims at, and is called forth by, an unknown, an enigma. Dante is able to invent—​or conjecture—​the world of his poem with utter freedom of imagination because the world it relates to is strictly speaking unrepresentable. The other world does impinge on and inform his representations at every point, but there is no calculus for how or with what results.5 Subjective mediation by the personal passion of the poet becomes the condition of possibility of revelation. Dante discovers the freedom of poetic imagination such as it can be exercised in a secular universe. The doctrine of artistic or creative genius will develop later in the Enlightenment, notably with Kant, to account for this productive faculty and its freedom unconfined by the apparent reality of the empirical world. Even so, already for Dante, such imagination is all geared toward and aimed at the absolute reality beyond all finite beings.

2  Alain de Libera, Le problème de l’être chez maître Eckhart: Logique et métaphysique de l’analogie (Genève: Cahiers de al Revue de théologie et de philosophie, 1980) parses this predicament in detail. 3 Cusanus’s De coniecturis (1441–​ 42) directly follows up and completes his groundbreaking De docta ignorantia (1440). 4 Pannenberg, Analogie und Offenbarung, presents this transition from objective analogy to subjective symbol penetratingly in Chapter VI: “Das Verblassen des Analogiegedankens auf dem Weg vom spätmittelalterlichen Platonismus zur neuzeitlichen Philosophie,” 181–​211. 5  Contemporary scientific cosmology again pullulates in imaginings of other worlds, even ones beyond time and space. This science requires us “to believe in the existence of many other universes” that “we cannot prove” and that “are accidental and incalculable.” Mary-​Jane Rubenstein, Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 214.

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158  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity In effect, Dante exploits analogy for the very same reason that Scotus rejects it. Both understand that in their post-​Aquinian era analogy cannot provide scientific knowledge of God and of the “separate entities” of the other and invisible world. All this surpasses our sense-​bound means of knowing, for we have no sensory intuition of purely intellectual beings. This is the predicament that Kant takes to heart as the starting point for his critical philosophy. At this point, accordingly, representation of the other world can only be a free invention. This causes objective discourse and practices in finite realms such as jurisprudence to enter into crisis and contradiction.6 Yet, on this basis, Dante pursues his poetic creation as the expression of his personal, existential relation to an ultimate reality. In Paradiso IV.40–​42, Dante explains (through Beatrice) that even Scripture employs poetic metaphor to speak to human beings of God and angels, since human understanding takes from sense alone (“solo da sensato apprende”) that which it then makes worthy of intellection. Thus Scripture “condescends” to human faculties, attributing “hand and foot” to God and human form to the angels Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, while “meaning something else” (“e altro intende,” IV.43–​48). Dante’s own methods of representing metaphysical reality likewise resort to sensible images as existential witness to a metaphysical experience that is otherwise ineffable. Scotus, like Kant, and well before him, turns to the will and love as the only way of relating to this higher, supernatural reality that cannot be known theoretically—​not concretely anyway, not by us, at least not in this life. And this delimitation of the realm of spirit and freedom from that of nature and necessity frees the sublunary world (in fact, the whole physical universe) to be investigated in terms of its own logic and intrinsic order. This universe becomes the domain of the natural sciences. Duns opens a sphere of conceptual creation—​just as Dante opens a sphere of imaginative creation—​that is autonomous, a realm of freedom and contingency, a secular realm. Yet it still stands radically in relation to another realm, one that is inaccessible by merely human means but one that can be sounded by theology. In contrast to theological revelation, human means discover their own self-​reflexive powers of establishing relations internal to reflection as a mediated way of relating to the radically exterior. These self-​reflexive ways of science and imagination become radically separated from theology after Scotus, and even Dante becomes adamant against confusing the secular and sacred orders, notably with regard to their claims for authority in government. In Monarchia, Book III, he argues rigorously for this binary, “two-​truths” type of political doctrine, which reverberates throughout his oeuvre from Convivio IV.iv-​ix,

6  This upheaval in the juridical domain is examined by Justin Steinberg, Dante and the Limits of the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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(Dis)Analogy and Imaginative Conjecture  159 on the foundations of imperial authority, to Paradiso XXX.133–​48, with its projected celestial incoronation of Emperor Henry VII. Both secular and spiritual authority, nevertheless, in Dante’s teaching, are based on a direct relation to the one God, as Monarchia III.xv and all of Paradiso unequivocally attest.7

7 These complicated relations are lucidly delineated by Jason Aleksander, “Dante’s Understanding of the Two Ends of Human Desire and the Relationship between Philosophy and Theology,” The Journal of Religion 91/​2 (2011): 158–​87.

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30  Reflective Repetition Realized in the Supersensible Reality of Willing

Dante’s imaginings of the other world become fully real as “repetitions” in a human sphere in some way answering to what contact with the higher reality has inspired in him. He recognizes God as being inaccessible per se (as Godself) to human means and theoretical reason, as symbolized finally at his poem’s end by the geometer’s vain attempt to square the circle (XXXIII.133–​35). Still, divinity can be mediated by repetition as enacted in poetic experience and also in the actualizations of the liturgy and other religious rituals. A similar sort of status as real, even though removed to a realm of humanly created formal objects, applies to Scotus’s metaphysics. Yet Scotus begins to erect a system of transcendental concepts that cordons off the humanly accessible sphere from divine intervention, and this solution remains intact through Kant. In Dante, the discovery of the autonomous sphere of representation bequeaths to modernity what we know as the world of poetic fiction and aesthetic imagination. It will be understood in the Romantic age, with its demiurgic notion of poetic creativity, as a realm of human self-​determination and autonomous will. But Dante pursued poetry rather as a subjective, interpretative reenactment of a divine act of self-​revelation.1 In a parallel development, Scotus originated the theory of the will as self-​ determination that eventually, in the Enlightenment, would be developed in terms of subjective autonomy by Kant. The self-​determination of the will, its autonomy in the Kantian sense of the “categorical imperative”—​ willing what can be willed universally by every rational creature independently of all particular interest—​is essentially a self-​reflexive form of willing and therefore of consciousness. It is based, in effect, on the formal point of view introduced by Duns Scotus. On this basis of formal reality, of distinctions made by the will itself that are nevertheless real, Duns thought through just such a “Kantian” conception of willing and built it into the foundations of the edifice of modern metaphysics. 1  I argue this extensively in Dante’s Interpretive Journey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and in The Revelation of Imagination: From Homer and the Bible through Virgil and Augustine to Dante (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), Chapter 5.

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Reflective Repetition  161 For Duns, such autonomous willing or freedom is “transcategorical” and thus applies to humans and God alike. Rather than being determined by natural striving for good, the will is radically free and yet not merely arbitrary. Through self-​reflection, the will is able to choose what is universally good rather than just personally useful. Such a good will exercises a desire for justice (affectio iustitiae) rather than just for the willer’s own comfort (affectio commodi). This is a self-​reflexive understanding of the will and of the good as self-​engendering. Such good will entails a transcendence of the naturally given, yet it reconnects with the All on the basis of its own original self-​determination on universally reasonable grounds, which it must itself forge and choose. Will rather than reason thus becomes the origin of the good. In will, according to this modern understanding, resides the true rational power of origination. This transcendence belonging to an underived freedom beyond cosmological determination belongs, in the first instance, to God: it opens the world to contingency and to determination by a historical goal. Absolute freedom introduces contingency into the world and chooses its own end as an historical event. Honnefelder hails this as the “Transcendence of an underivable freedom whose contingent terminus lies in history itself” (“Transcendenz einer unableitbaren Freiheit … deren kontingenter Terminus in der Geschichte selbst liegt,” Woher kommen wir?, 206). The premises laid down here in Duns’s modern metaphysical reflection will eventually issue in a sort of apotheosis of human freedom in German idealism—​signally in the philosophy of the absolute freedom of the “I” propounded by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–​1814).

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31  Fichte’s Absolutization—​and Overcoming—​of Self-​Reflection

The reconceptualization of God or the infinite as a degree of intensity of being, which we have found in Duns and essentially in Dante alike, reaches to Fichte and shapes his “original insight.”1 Fichte’s theory of self-​consciousness is called forth by the aporias of the reflection theory of self-​consciousness: he pointed out that the “I” must already know itself in order to recognize itself in reflection. It is therefore impossible for self-​consciousness to be the result of reflection. Since every act of consciousness presupposes this self-​conscious “I,” the “I” is always already consciousness of itself. For Fichte, furthermore, the whole world is posited by this “I.” Kant had discovered this “I” as a “transcendental apperception” necessarily accompanying every perception or thought whatsoever. However, Kant had deemed it to be knowable by self-​reflection, and this is what Fichte “discovered” to be impossible. Fichte’s philosophy in the end is a radical breaking out of the circles of self-​reflection presupposed by previous philosophy in the modern mode leading up to Kant. For Fichte, the “I” can never be properly seized as an object of self-​reflection. It is always already there as a subject. It is also inherently practical, a “deed-​doing” (“Tathandlung”) actively shaping its reality as the purely free subject that is not graspable as a reflected object because, instead, it is always already presupposed as the ground of every object. Fichte’s radical formulation of the immediate self-​positing of the “I” (“unmittelbare Sich-​ selbst-​ Setzen des Ich”) was epoch-​ making. Fichte formed the idea of the self-​positing “I” simply as the completely unmediated identity of subject and object. It required no reflexive philosophical operation and no pre-​reflexive transcendental action or mediation of any kind. Fichte’s discovery resonated as an unconditional affirmation of the “I” in the age of blossoming bourgeois liberalism. The newfound sense of the absolutely unlimited freedom of the ego was posited as always present at the base of any reality, always already inherent in its meaning 1  Dieter Henrich, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), trans. David R.  Lachterman as “Fichte’s Original Insight,” in Contemporary German Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. Darrel E.  Christensen (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982), 15–​53.

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Fichte’s Absolutization and Overcoming of Reflection  163 and possible significance for consciousness. The “not-​I,” which is also recognized by Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (1804), was always thought only in relation to the “I” as a pure positing of self. There could be no other basis whatsoever behind it. Fichte understood this non-​self-​reflective activity of the “I” as the true sense of religion, its moral core and basis, which necessarily preceded and underlay any kind of edifying knowledge given by revelation. This was the point of his earliest treatise—​An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (Versuch einer Critik aller Offenbarung, 1792). In this work outlining the essential starting point for his thinking and its pivot in unlimited human freedom, Fichte appropriated and radicalized the Kantian understanding of religion as based on practical reason. He recognized the act of the “I” affirming itself as the purely positive foundation of any religious belief. Whereas the dogmatics of theological revelation in Lutheran Protestantism typically claimed the Word of God in Scripture as a pre-​ reflexive truth demanding simply to be accepted, Fichte highlighted the pure activity of the thinking “I” as the prior condition for any experience or encounter even with the Word of Scripture. In a striking reversal—​but coming out of the same milieu of early Jena Romanticism and partially in response to Fichte—​ Friedrich Schleiermacher, in The Christian Faith (Der christliche Glaube, 1830), found the universal spring of religion rather in the feeling of absolute dependence. But Schleiermacher’s subordination of the individual self to a higher being and greater whole was disempowering by comparison with the proclamation of the unconditional freedom of the self in its rational activity as origin of all in the “gospel” according to Fichte. Consequently, Fichte’s compelling insight proved irresistible at a historical moment, after Rousseau, of coming to consciousness of the human individual as the fundamental reality underlying all the artifices of society. It was a potentially revolutionary age that awoke to the intuition of the conscious “I” as itself the abiding reality immediately present in every reality. Everything else was mediated in its way of being and of manifesting itself by the “I,” who abided as itself the only immediacy. This at first seems fully aligned with Descartes’s insight as formulated in the cogito—​“I think therefore I am”—​positing the self-​consciousness of the “I” as first principle. However, for Fichte, the “I” was no longer just a principle for establishing truth and securing the method of inquiry in the sciences, as in the Cartesian Discours de la méthode: Pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences. The conscious “I” turned its awareness self-​consciously on itself as the very matter and essential substance of every possible cognition. This immediate identity of the “I” with all became integral and infinite—​without limits. The “I” was not just the foundation of knowledge, lying at the bottom of the pyramid, as for Descartes. Instead, the self-​positing of the “I” became the essential content of all knowledge and the key to every possible experience. We enter into everything knowable and doable in and through the

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164  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity self-​positing of the “I.” There is nothing that is not originated in and from and with this “I.” Fichte had such a sensational effect because he expressed the fully discovered and realized infinity of the being of the individual self that would define a whole epoch—​the narcissistic age of modernity, in which we are still entangled, to a considerable extent, today. It has consequences for political economy and capitalism that have been made manifest in ugly forms such as the “me” generation characterized by sheer consumerism, acknowledging no higher moral or spiritual imperatives. Fichte’s treatise on the modern state and its self-​ reflectively enclosed economy clairvoyantly adumbrates the direction of these future developments.2 In this outlook, the self-​positing (and finally self-​serving) “I” is the only truly fundamental, underived reality. The discovery of a power vested in oneself as simple individual able to take consciousness of oneself—​not as king or priest, or as qualified by any other station conferring special prerogatives, but simply as the “I,” unconditionally powerful in its own sphere—​proved to be not only seductive, but revolutionary. This unlimited empowerment of the “I” remains in untold ways the purely speculative foundation of the democratic revolution of the last two and more centuries. An emancipation of the individual self from all higher purpose or extrinsic directedness brings in its train our own destiny with all its dilemmas in the age of unbridled personal self-​realization. However, this is not the only direction in which such insight could be turned. It could also be directed toward the alternative modernity that is projected in these pages from Dante. Christian Moevs discovers in Dante and his medieval metaphysics essentially the same insight that “Everything except the subject is unnecessary and contingent.” This “metaphysical subject,” variously called One, Being, Intellect, God, etc., is the only “ground of experience.”3 The common sense of a duality between self and other was abrogated by this uncommon wisdom, which, nonetheless, is also the common property of virtually all mystical religions. “All is one” can express the will to self-​annihilation, for example, in Buddhist religion, but it can also signify the coincidence of the “I” with the All. “Thou art that” (tat tvam asi), “you are Brahman, the Existent,” as Hindu scripture says.4

Fichte’s Reversal of Reflection into Revelation The historical impact and contextual relations of the revival of Fichte by Dieter Henrich along with his students and followers in the Heidelberg School is reconstructed and assessed in its scope and importance by 2 Fichte, Der geschlossene Handelsstaat (1800), trans. Anthony Curtis Adler as The Closed Commercial State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012). 3 Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, 170. 4  Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7 of the Sama Veda.

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Fichte’s Absolutization and Overcoming of Reflection  165 Manfred Frank.5 Moving against the postmodern trend proclaiming the death of the subject and thereby marginalizing all investigation into the subject’s self-​consciousness, Frank has documented in detail the subsequent history of this problematic of self-​reflexivity in extensive anthologies of classical readings, as well as in detailed analyses of his own.6 Frank turns thinking back self-​reflexively to the subject, which was supposedly liquidated by the post-​structuralist turn, and he finds crucial models for an alternative to secular scientific epistemology in Romantic thinkers such as Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, who were among Fichte’s most zealous converts.7 In this interpretive light, it has become possible to see Fichte as not a continuation and radicalization of the philosophy of self-​consciousness inherited from Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant but rather as their radical reversal. Fichte’s essential insight—​to repeat—​is that “I”-​consciousness cannot be constructed reflexively because it is always already presupposed by every act of reflection. The nature of consciousness, so conceived, cannot be philosophically analyzed and broken down into subjective and objective components. It is something rather of the order of revelation. In his The Way towards the Blessed Life or The Doctrine of Religion (Anweisung zum seligen Leben oder auch die Religionslehre, 1806), Fichte thinks of God in apophatic terms as “conceivable inconceivability” (“begreifliche Unbegreiflichkeit”) and as “Being beyond the concept” (“Seyn jenseits des Begriffes”).8 Already in his Wissenschaftslehre in 1804, Fichte had emphasized the annihilation of the concept through the pure light of consciousness.9 Fichte thinks the Kantian subjectivist premises of knowing so radically that he reverses their subjectivity into an absolute and essentially revelatory form of knowing. He points us back from reflection toward knowing as revelation—​as does Dante. Again, Moevs’s seeing revelation 5 Manfred Frank, “Welche Gründe gibt es, Selbstbewusstsein für Irreflexiv zu halten?” Proto-​Sociology—​Essays on Philosophy, 1–​21. Downloaded 6/​15/​2016 from ProtoSociology: An International Journal and Interdisciplinary Project: www. protosociology.de/​Download/​Frank-​Selbstbewusstsein.pdf. 6 Manfred Frank, Selbstbewußtseinstheorien von Fichte bis Sartre (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), which includes his own “Fragmente einer Geschichte der Selbstbewußtseins-​Theorie von Kant bis Sartre,” 413–​599. 7 Most important in this regard are Frank’s Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität. Reflexionen über Subjekt, Person und Individuum aus Anlaß ihrer ‘postmodernen’ Toterklärung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986)  and Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik: Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), as well as his Das Problem “Zeit” in der deutschen Romantik: Zeitbewusstsein und Bewusstsein von Zeitlichkeit in der frühromantischen Philosophie und in Tiecks Dichtung (Munich: Winkler, 1972). 8 Fichte, Anweisung zum seligen Leben (1806), in Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sämmtliche Werke (subsequently “SW”), ed. J. H. Fichte, vol. 5 (Berlin: Verlag von Veit und Comp., 1845/​46),  453f. 9  Wissenschaftslehre (1804), 4. Vortrag, SW X, 146.

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166  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity in Dante as unmediated consciousness is strikingly similar—​except for his emphasis on its selflessness. Sharing in the same secular breakthrough to infinite individual freedom, Fichte, like Dante, manages to think its unity with apophatic theological revelation—​or non-​revelation. In either case, it is the impasse to reflection that becomes revealing and puts the self into relation with something sacred in the form of a (w)hol(l)y Other. Fichte takes his essential insight in an explicitly religious and apophatic direction that turns it against the Cartesian, scientistic model of self-​reflection. In The Way towards the Blessed Life, which bends his rational philosophy toward a mystical wisdom, Fichte finally gives up the project of self-​reflection completely, since it can produce only images and not reach being itself. Leaving behind reflection, man knows himself as “the Absolute itself” (“das Absolute selber”) by a purely mystical intuition. This takes place through love, the source of all certainty, truth, and reality (“Die Liebe ist die Quelle aller Gewißheit; und aller Wahrheit und aller Realität”).10 However, even this mystical transcendence of self-​reflection remains still apophatically grounded in self-​relation. It consists essentially in the inability of self-​reflection to grasp its own inalienable source and structure, which consists in a vocation or a calling. The “I” still sets itself into relation with and answers to the not-​I, which, to this extent, falls within the I’s relation to itself. Such a relation is understood psychoanalytically as a relation of answering to a superego consisting in internalized social norms or to an unconscious “big Other.”11

From Religious to Poetic Revelation—Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hamann Fichte’s thought was taken up with enthusiasm and turned in a poetic direction by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. Fichte’s critique of religious revelation or “Offenbarung” leads Novalis to a theory of poetic revelation. The gap between truth and language, or reality and signs, is Novalis’s focus in his Fichte-​Studien, composed around 1794–​95 in conversation also with his friend, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Novalis sets out from Fichte’s transcendental critique and its demonstration of the necessary namelessness of the Absolute in order to descry a higher knowing beyond concepts in which language returns to a state of song. This was presumably its original state, according to an ancient idea refurbished by Rousseau in his Essay on the Origin of Languages (Essai sur l’origine des langues, 1781). Novalis asks how our currently de-​musicalized language 10 Fichte, Anweisung zum seligen Leben (1806), SW V, 541 11  Dominik Finkelde, “Die Transzendenz der reinen Selbstbeziehung. Zu einer Denkfigur bei Lacan und Fichte,” in Die Frage nach dem Unbedingten: Gott als genuines Thema der Philosophie, ed. Felix Resch and Martin Klinkosch (Dresden: Text & Dialog, 2016), 513.

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Fichte’s Absolutization and Overcoming of Reflection  167 can again become song and so reveal truth in its wholeness as an inseparable fusion of thought, communication, and creative production.12 Lyrical language envisages whole truth or the Absolute, thereby overcoming the modern forgetting of language, in which it is reduced to a functional sign. In “Monolog,” Novalis describes the perfectly self-​ reflective, self-​referential status of language stripped to its originary core. “The peculiar thing about language—​that it is concerned simply with itself—​no one knows. That’s why it is such a wonderful and fruitful mystery” (“Gerade das Eigenthümliche der Sprache, daß sie sich blos um sich selbst bekümmert, weiß keiner. Darum ist sie ein so wunderbares und fruchtbares Geheimniß”).13 A certain affinity of this vision with Dante and his poetic language as a canto general distilling universal wisdom into lyrical music was sensed by German Romantic thinkers. It is expressed by Friedrich Schlegel, who in his “Conversation on Poetry” (1800), hails “the great Dante, the holy founder and father of modern poetry” (“der große Dante, der heilige Stifter und Vater der modernen Poesie”).14 This cue was followed up by Schelling in his 1803 essay “On Dante in Relation to Philosophy” (“Über Dante in philosophischer Beziehung”).15 For Schelling and a certain Romantic clan, Dante represented an ideal of wholeness before the modern split between politics, religion, and art. Such a culture was longed for, aspired to, and prophetically announced already in “The Oldest Outline of German idealism (“Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” 1796).16 Dante had fostered just such a culture still possessed of its sacred purpose and destiny: “In the holy of holies, where religion and poetry are married, stands Dante as high priest and consecrates all modern art to its calling” (“Im Allerheiligsten, wo Religion und Poesie verbündet, steht Dante als

12 Cf. Wolfgang Janke,”Enttönter Gesang—​ Sprache und Wahrheit in den ‘Fichte-​ Studien’des Novalis,” in Erneuerung der Transzendentalphilosophie im Anschluß an Kant und Fichte, ed. Klaus Hammacher and Albert Mures (Stuttgart: Frommann-​ Holzboog, 1979), 168–​203. 13  Novalis, “Monolog,” Das philosophisch-​theoretische Werk, vol. 2 of Werke, ed. Hans-​ Joachim Mähl and Richard H.  Samuel (Munich: Wissenschaftliche Buchgeselschaft, 1999), 438–​439. 14 Friedrich Schlegel, “Gespräch über die Poesie,” Athenaeum (Berlin, 1800), in Charakteristiken und Kritiken, vol. 1 (1706–​1801), 297. 15  Schelling’s essay appeared originally in the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, edited jointly by Hegel and Schelling. It is now available in an edition by Stefan Dietsche (Leipzig: Reclam, 1981), 412–​17, and in English translation in Michael Caesar, ed., Dante: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1989), 409–​19. 16 G. W.  F. Hegel, Frühe Schriften in Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 234–​36. This essay is preserved in the handwriting of the young Hegel but likely reflects the collaboration between him and Schelling and Hölderlin.

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168  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity Hohepriester und weiht die ganze moderne Kunst für ihre Bestimmung ein”).17 We observe in these remarkable refashionings how the religious vision of the Middle Ages undergoes an aesthetic conversion so as to be able to be appropriated by modern individuals on the authority of their own sovereign “I.” In far-​reaching ways, and ironically in spite of Dante’s emphasis on the necessary institutional authority of Church and State as Magisterium and Empire, this affirmation of the radical freedom of the individual turns out to belong essentially to his legacy to the modern world. A  climactic moment in the Purgatorio, in which Virgil (alias reason) “crowns and mitres” Dante (“io te sovra te corono e mitrio,” XXVII.142) as free to do his own will, is emblematic and incalculable in its reverberations all through modern history down to us. However, a turn from idealism toward existentialism based on the specifically Lutheran “I” of radically individual faith (“hier stehe ich”) gives a further, literally “crucial” twist to this story. In the lineage of post-​ Kantian, Protestant, German thinkers, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–​88) has the strongest claim to be Dante’s heir in interpreting language as “sibylline leaves” bearing theological revelation.18 Hamann is Kierkegaard’s forerunner as a religious existentialist inspired by Socrates, using irony and paradox in a self-​critical, self-​crucifying dissolution of reason as knowing its own unknowing.19 In Hamann, as in Dante, the apophatic dimension of language, uncovered self-​reflectively, becomes its most telling resource as revelation.

17  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, Part I, vol. 5 (Stuttgart/​ Augsburg: Cotta, 1859), 152. 18 Hamann, Sibyllinische Blätter des Magus in Norden, ed. Friedrich Cramer (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1819). John R.  Betz, After Enlightenment: The Post-​ Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann (London: Wilely Blackwell, 2009) and W. M. Alexander, Johann Georg Hamann: Philosophy and Faith (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966)  effectively highlight this aspect of Hamann’s thought. 19  Walter Lowrie, Johann Georg Hamann: An Existentialist (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2016 [1950]). Hamann’s fear in face of his own existentialist breakthroughs is documented by Wilhelm Koepp, “Hammans Absage an den Existentialismus (‘Fliegenden Brief’ erster Fassung), nebst Anbahnung einer Gesamtsicht,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Universität Rostock 5 (1955/​56): 109–​16.

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32  From Analogy to Metaphor

These permutations in German idealism and its aftermath represent some of the furthest developments of modern self-​reflexive subjectivity (and its inherent self-​negation), which can be traced forward from Dante and Duns Scotus. They are included here for the sake of gaining historical perspective on the birth, or rather the crucial turn, of self-​consciousness at the threshold between the Middle Ages and modernity that is our principal focus. Still more crucial nuances of this destiny-​laden juncture in the history of self-​reflection and consciousness remain to be teased out from the comparison of Scotus and Dante in their own historical contexts. This context is shared, and yet is very differently inflected in each case. The bifocal vision thus afforded enables us to outline this historically pivotal juncture at which the stakes of self-​reflection for modernity momentously emerge.

Henry of Ghent and Analogical Imagination The key interlocutor for Scotus, and the most authoritative Parisian theologian of his time, is Henry of Ghent (1217–​93). His analogical thinking is close to Dante’s in some surprising and suggestive ways. Like Scotus, Henry accepted the Avicennien principle of Being as the “first intelligible”—​as what our intellect always grasps and understands before it understands any particular being. But Henry attempted to evade the (for Scotus necessary) consequence of the univocity of Being and to preserve a certain doctrine of analogy. In fact, he expanded this doctrine to include the analogy not only between infinite and finite being but also between substance and its accidents, between res vera and res fictiva, and between real essences and mental constructions. The transcendental analogy between God and creatures thus proliferated to a general analogy between disparate categories of beings and ideas. Theological analogy became general ontological analogy.1

1  Henry of Ghent’s Summa of Ordinary Questions. Article One: On the Possibility of Knowing, trans. Roland J. Teske, S.J. (South Bend: St. Augustine Press, 2008).

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170  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity This shift in the focus and application of analogy can lead in a “secularizing” direction of a type that is pursued by Dante, whereby the all-​ pervasive relation with divinity is translated into worldly terms. Henry’s doctrine of analogy is based on universal imitation of the Supreme Being by all beings. Such imitation is the foundation of analogy. It is not an empirically real or verifiable relation. It is, instead, metaphysical and imposed from above rather than being grounded in things and their mutual causal relations. Unlike for Aquinas and Bonaventure, for Henry the analogy of being is rooted in God and not in the world. Relations for Henry are eternal and are founded in God’s own self-​relation. Relation thus has a transcendent status. It is real in God, and all Creation is constituted essentially by its relation to God. The articulable unity of being between God and creatures for Henry, then, is purely nominal. There is no stateable common being between them, and yet their relation enables all manner of analogous representations. The status of these representations is formal and “objective,” or we might say—​as would apply more obviously to Dante—​fictive and metaphorical. This special status of relations is a way of assimilating the Avicennian-​ Augustinian turn to subjectivity that upstaged the Aristotelian filiation in the generation of Scholastic theologians (and intellectuals influenced by them) following Aquinas, to which Dante and Duns alike belong. Formally, Dante adheres to the Thomistic line working from creatures as effects toward God as their Cause. But his imagination conceives all things, even if from a subjective perspective of metaphor, already in the horizon of the divine Source, the “fount whence all truth derives” (“fonte ond’ ogne ver deriva,” Paradiso IV.116), the Alpha and Omega (“Alfa e O,” XXVI.17). The alphabet of Dante’s historical and apocalyptic vision is reinscribed into this transcendent Origin and Telos. This entails an otherworldly orientation that aligns Dante more with Avicennian Augustinianism and its transcendentalist tendencies, notwithstanding his embrace of Thomistic Aristotelianism, with its more empirical approach grounded in the physical senses.

Secular and Theological in Dante and Duns In sum, the turn from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century posed the special challenge of rethinking the conflict between the Greco-​Arabic scientific worldview, as mediated especially by Avicenna and Averroes, and the providential principles of Christian revelation. The ecclesiastical condemnation of radical Aristotelian propositions in 1277 in Paris in effect declared that the two worldviews that Thomas and Albert had attempted to harmonize were not finally compatible. The 1277 condemnations condition and motivate Duns’s reformulation of Christian metaphysics and theology, which radically revises the Thomistic synthesis. Bringing together Aristotelian metaphysics with Franciscan spirituality, Duns finds a new way to allow both rational philosophy and biblical revelation to

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From Analogy to Metaphor  171 retain truth in their own proper spheres. Duns’s solution is a way that opens upon our secular world, and in this respect Dante’s project runs parallel. Both are inspired theologically to make secular thinking possible. Even while remaining affectively attached and religiously oriented to a higher order of reality, Duns accords an independent secular status to objective (proto-​scientific) knowing of the finite world severed from the infinite, which is unknowable in its singularity. Duns sees this secular realm thenceforth as illuminated only by the light of nature and as opaque to us regarding the divine Light. His metaphysics affords only an abstract knowledge that there is a First Cause and provides no means to see into its nature. Dante, faced with the same uncoupling, qualifies human knowledge of the infinite and divine implicitly as subjective and recasts it as existential—​or as poetic. Thus, for Dante, the finite remains translucent to the infinite, even in the acknowledged incommensurability of the two and in the admitted incapacity of human thought and language properly or adequately (scientifically) to know the divine.2 Still, there is a vast field of expressivity involving the entire cosmos and human history that can orient us to the divine source of our life. It can be leveraged by an analogical approach. This is the submerged basis for Dante’s triumphant theological affirmations. Rather than abstracting from our existential involvement with worldly entities, as Duns does in order to render possible metaphysics as an objective science, Dante enters fully into this experiential dimension of knowledge as blindly groping toward the Source of things and existence. However, this dimension is for him as secular (or worldly) as it is for Duns, with his abstract metaphysical science. The secular sphere is, in either case, predicated on the realization—​through self-​critical self-​ reflection on the part of human reason—​of God’s radical inaccessibility to human knowledge and language. Nonetheless, both pioneers, in their fields of metaphysics and poetics respectively, remain inspired essentially by theology in their efforts to give the secular world an autonomous status. Their scions, however, in large part, would lose this orientation and eventually turn to a more single-​minded and one-​sided pursuit of the secular. Dante’s worldly knowledge remains fully integral to his theological vision rather than being split off for separate development. The split of metaphysics and empirical science from theology with Duns, in contrast,

2  Convivio II.iv.17 suggestively employs the image of someone perceiving the transfusion of light through closed eyelids like a bat. Such is human perception even of “spiritual creatures” (“creature spirituali,” II.iv.15), for which we have no sense (“non avendo di loro alcuno senso”). Still, some resplendence of their light shines through to our intellect (“pure resplende nel nostro intelletto alcuno lume”). Such translucence mitigates the inaptitude of human intellect to apprehend the divine intellect, which transcends it disproportionately (“da esso è improporzionalmente soperchiato,” II.iv.14).

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172  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity while incipient, is nevertheless radical. Underlying this difference is the way in which Dante remained true to the analogical worldview, even after it was metamorphosed into only a subjective vision. Especially in the Paradiso, Dante obsessively acknowledges the divine’s inaccessibility to and transcendence of human knowing. However, analogy’s being subjectively mediated does not deprive it of reality for Dante, even though this is what in Duns’s vocabulary we would have to call “formal” reality. Dante still uses the vocabulary of analogy as if it were objectively real, just as he still deploys classical mythology, placing figures such as Minos or Cerberus realistically within his Christian Hell. But he has revised the truth status of both lexicons. He has devised for his fundamental truth claim a different basis in his new, self-​reflexively constructed subjectivity. In the new epistemological paradigm adapted to their different purposes by Duns and by Dante respectively, the secular and the religious are connected in the intention of a willful subject and its representations. Dante still invokes in all its splendor and power the symbolic universe, and his work is an extension and glorious culmination of medieval analogical thinking and its worldview.3 This is where he remains closest to Henry of Ghent. But he has made his own subjectivity into this universe’s linchpin, and this is the handle by which later poets of the secular age will pick up on his precedent. The subjective sensibility of an individual poet, such as one finds in Milton or Blake, or even in Leopardi, Baudelaire, and Rilke, is now the key to connecting things together analogically—​or metaphorically, to be more exact—​in the total order of the cosmos.4 Sensations, even smells (“ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens”), now have “the expansion of infinite things” (“ayant l’expansion des choses infinies”) in the “correspondences” of Baudelaire’s symbolist poetics. Such poetry begins in Dante’s ultimate testament, the Paradiso, with the “I,” who is reduced to reiterations of ineffability and synaesthetic metaphors vis-​ à-​ vis an unfathomably other God—​ in XX.16–​ 30, for example, where he sees sound take shape at the neck of a cithar. But precisely this limit opens a whole universe of metaphorical representation and free personal expression, the new sphere of “formal” modern poetic creativity inhabited by Mallarmé and Valéry. The individual subject—​ even in its explosion—​has become the principle through which all reality is filtered and reflected. This approach is quintessentially modern, even though Dante conceives of it as still fully integrated within a total symbolic universe, a cosmos metaphysically ordered by the divine Logos.

3 Bruno Shah, “Apocalyptic Specularity in Dante’s Eschatology: Narcissus and the Imagination of Salvation,” Modern Theology 34/​1 (2018): 42–​69, effectively demonstrates this for Dante in terms adapted from Hoff’s The Analogical Turn. 4  I carry out this interpretation of Dante’s laying down of the premises of modern poetics of revelation in Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante.

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From Analogy to Metaphor  173 Only subsequent to the application of Ockham’s razor would it seem possible, and even natural, to excise this wider context of meaning.5 The imagination of a higher reality that cannot be properly represented, but that can be “repeated” (or realized) under the impress and influence of an experience of contact with the limits of possible experience and even its “beyond,” is, after all, still a kind of representation. Dante exploits just such representation in order to reconnect with an ontological fullness of the Other outside human conception and beyond instrumental reason’s reach. Duns, too, is still in touch with this other reality through liturgical reactualization of the event of divinity. Yet modernity, overall, will abandon the connection with any higher reality and treat the new formal reality fabricated by science as the true nature of reality itself. This is made possible, in Scotus’s terms, by univocity. Univocity, not analogy, is necessary for objective scientific knowledge, as it comes to be conceived especially by the Franciscans (influenced by Avicenna and Augustine) in this age of the split between positive theological knowing (fideism) and demonstrable scientific knowing (positivism). Dante still works through images and likenesses, and with an investment of belief, in order to try to fathom God’s positive revelation in the Bible and in the cosmos. He recreates or repeats revelation through the probing of human experience taken to its limits. Yet he has accepted the fundamental point, embraced also by Scotus, that the secular world has to assume responsibility for itself and create by self-​reflection its own relation to the transcendent order. It can do so only through love. Duns makes theology into an exercise in charity, availing himself of an Augustinian precedent and warrant. Dante does something similar in his own imaginative way: his representation of an imaginative universe consists in reflections of his mind and heart. All Dante’s representations are forms of self-​reflection and self-​affection. The metaphorical image for Dante, like the metaphysical or ethical concept for Duns, is a way of secularizing our contemplation of the divine—​of rendering it in terms reflecting the world focused through the knowing subject. Still, a cautionary note is in order here. It is important not to take this as a license for purely subjective fantasy. On the contrary, Dante becomes harsher than ever against arbitrary appropriations of Scripture. Paradiso XXIX.94–​126 delivers a resounding reprimand against irresponsible preachers, pardoners, and friars larding their sermons with trivialities (“ciance”). In the age of representation, “invenzioni” and “favole” are liable to become means of vain self-​promotion and exploitation of others. Such irresponsible fabrications are anything but disclosures of deep theological truth through personal investment and 5  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) documents many historical stages of this shift from the self’s finding the ends of human life written into the cosmic order to its producing them from within itself.

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174  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity ethical-​poetic self-​fashioning. Recognizing an inescapable mediation of all understanding by the subject makes it even more imperative—​even if not easier—​to distinguish what is authentic poetic vision and existential witness from what is not. We still live in the crisis engendered by this ambiguity.

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33  Univocity as Ground of the Autonomy of the Secular

The significance of the univocity thesis is that it makes “being” accessible to conceptual comprehension. It puts a stop to leaving finite being gaping open to an infinite Being that cannot be grasped and that undermines all sense given to finite beings by making the finite untrue in relation to the one true Being of God. For Scotus, being is reality that is univocally grasped, and the formal distinctions we make in order to enable us to think about it in its particular finite manifestations pertain to real being. Only so do humans have a handle on reality. Otherwise, they are helplessly dependent on a mystery that they cannot fathom. They are, of course, still dependent on God, whom they cannot grasp, but at least they have a real grasp of the beings of the world. This is the enabling condition of all scientific investigation and of human self-​empowerment to control nature and dominate the world. As will become patent and explicit much later with Kant (although it is already incipient with Scotus), the relation to God is no longer theoretical, no longer entertained by the intellect, but only practical. It is not that we can claim in a strong sense to know anything more about God thanks to univocity. For Duns, univocity is merely a semantic theory. It is about signifying rather than about knowing God, and the two are not the same. Thanks to Duns’s postulated univocity, we can complete our system and think about beings without having an incomprehensible “Being” stand in the way. Hovering blankly as a hole in the middle of our world, such an incomprehensible Source or Cause is so utterly other than its effects that it lames every effort of ours to forge an objective, causal knowledge of things. Such an absolute enigma defeats any attempt at comprehensive or systematic knowledge of the world. Faced with an analogical universe grounded on such a mystery, we find ourselves in a world of magic or miracle, where interventions from the wholly Other may occur at any time without any rational causal logic. The inscrutable mystery of Being is always there at the heart of anything we observe, so we cannot observe it as conforming to any law that we could possibly understand. This totally incalculable mystery must be held at bay and be circumscribed in order to create a space for building a system of

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176  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity self-​reflective knowledge. Duns still acknowledges this enveloping mystery, but, with him, our language and conceptual system turn their reflection on themselves and give an account of themselves in terms of their own making that they can know and define unequivocally. Rational thought need no longer lose itself in the absolutely Other. It must simply acknowledge this otherness as external to its theoretical range—​as beyond its ken. This newfound freedom of speculative thought emancipated from any overriding concern for ultimate mystery, demonstrates its far-​reaching fecundity not only in science but also in the new realm of morality inaugurated by Scotus and leading to Kant. Morality is now based on the self-​determination of the will and yet is not purely arbitrary. The will decides freely on the basis of reasons that it chooses to invest with motivating meaning.1 This is, then, subject-​ centered and subject-​ generated value. Yet it is not without relation to a greater whole outside itself. On the contrary, the will is free only to the extent that it wills not simply its own interest but rather what can be universally willed. Only such just and good willing can be the basis of the truly free will. The good will wills its own willing of the absolutely good, which is God, the highest and all-​comprehensive Good. Scotus’s morality is based on self-​relation that nevertheless intrinsically involves relation to the whole and to the highest and most perfect of all possibilities. These two dimensions—​self-​relation and relation to the Other—​are still closely coordinated for him. Reflexive freedom relates to a God who is no longer primarily a cosmological final Cause but rather an infinite and personal Good Will. Nonetheless, the question remains of whether univocity is used as an attempt to dominate reality by debasing it to what can be humanly defined or, instead, as an invention that can be integrated into a recognition—​and perhaps even a reverencing—​of the ultimately real. This is the question of whether our dependency on a higher or greater reality is cultivated as belonging to and constitutive of us or is narcissistically ignored and finally forgotten. This question will be answered only by subsequent centuries of history. And the verdict is still out. We can adhere either to the devitalization of the real by an instrumentalizing, scientific rationality, or we can follow Dante—​who in this regard is still echoed by Heidegger and Levinas—​in attempting to attune ourselves to the unfathomable call of Being and of responsibility to the incalculably Other. The reality grasped by science as empirical and exhaustive counts in many wisdom traditions from Platonism to Brahmanism as mere illusion. The modern tendency is to want to do away with the dependency of the finite on the Infinite and on anything that remains for it an enigma or a mystery in order to take control of one’s own destiny in a world that can be defined as a formal object by positive, self-​reflectively transparent 1  For Scotus’s moral theory, see particularly Ordinatio II, d.6, q.2; II, d.39, q.2; III, d.17. These and other materials can be found translated in Thomas Williams, ed., John Duns Scotus: Selected Writings on Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Univocity as Ground of the Secular  177 concepts and methods. The individual—​or collective—​human self finds in itself the resources it needs for creating a formal system in which the world can be manipulated in accordance with conceptual tools forged by language and be reduced ultimately to numerics. These concepts are reflections of the mind itself and are apparently generated out of its own constructive activities demanding self-​control and affording control over others. Common sense cries out: Why should we begin with negations like the infinite, the invisible, or the ineffable, rather than with what is positively present and manifest? There is obvious good sense in this, but it does not perhaps encompass the whole of wisdom either. This impulse to self-​ mastery is incarnate exemplarily in Spinoza’s totally positive philosophy, and it begins in crucial respects with Duns Scotus. However, both philosophers were still close enough to the wisdom traditions of medieval philosophy to realize that this positive autonomy is possible only with God and in relation to the totality of the universe. It is not the prerogative or the possession of a finite individual self-​consciousness answering only to its own private velleities. Our own constructions never make up the whole of reality. A  givenness of our being—​in some traditions, our being “created”—​is already presupposed by any of our conceptions.

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34  The Fate of Negative Theology in Scotus

For Duns, the active pursuit of negative theology and its unknowing knowing (docta ignorantia) no longer has any motivation nor even makes sense.1 He famously registers his great dislike for negation: Negatione summe non amamus (Ordinatio I, d.2, q.3, n.10). Although his critical thinking leaves a space for negative theology, he does not engage in any intellectual activity that would inhabit this space or sound its mystery. As a crucial precursor of modern scientific rationalism, he homogenizes knowledge. He acknowledges limits of human knowing, but remains within their bounds rather than pursuing the sense of everything as dependent on what cannot be known, namely, God. Already in the spirit of the British philosophical tradition, he prefers to know positive empirical entities simply in their own sphere. In the older tradition of negative theology, knowing in the sense of wisdom sought to take up and absorb the limits of knowing into knowing itself. It was, then, an unknowing knowing that entailed still an intense seeking. But Duns puts a stop to this. Prefiguring Kant, he lets the unknown be simply unknown in order to found the order of the knowable on concepts that can be secured by purely human means through transcendental reflection (or self-​reflection). For Duns, God becomes just another object of knowledge rather than the object of another kind of knowing (Schönberger, 495–​96). The latter unknowing knowing (alias negative theology) is a knowing that takes its own inevitable failure into account as part of the very concept of its object—​God, or the Absolute, as that which finite mind cannot adequately conceive. Turning away from this productive unknowing that orients us to an ungraspable whole, a Whole which is a member of no set, Duns, initiates the modern, self-​reflexive form of self-​knowing that was to acquire such confidence that it would eventually recognize no higher authority beyond itself. Duns himself does recognize such an authority, but he recognizes it as discernible only by faith and allows it to become scientifically 1  Cf. Rolf Schönberger, “Negationes non summe amamus: Duns Scotus’ Auseinandersetzung mit der negativen Theologie,” in John Duns Scotus: Metaphysics and Ethics, ed. Ludger Honnefelder, Rega Wood, and Mechthild Dreyer (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 475–​96.

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The Fate of Negative Theology in Scotus  179 irrelevant. As dependent on faith, it will be dispensed with by the greater part of his followers blazing the path of secular modernity. It is indeed true that self-​negation makes sense not in itself but only in relation to a movement of thought that takes its own negation up into what it knows. The same applies even to negation simpliciter. The absolutely formless can be meaningfully spoken of only in relation to form that vanishes into it, or that it grounds, or that will be formed out of its abyss. Dante’s theological poetics explores this dimension of Being beyond realized form via the vivid analogical modes of the Paradiso. This type of performative analogical procedure induces Denys Turner to describe Dante’s language as “the form of an openness to an unknowable otherness.”2 Through using form to imitate the formless by displaying particular forms under erasure, the poem “effects what it figures” (“efficat quod figurat,” Turner, 287).

2 Denys Turner, “How to Do Things with Words: Poetry as Sacrament in Dante’s Commedia,” in Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry, ed. Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 301.

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35  Coda on Scotus and Modality

A crucial angle of approach for understanding the change of perspective brought about by Duns concerns the new status of possibility. For Aristotle and Aquinas, everything begins from the actual, but Scotus, like Plato, hypothesizes possibilities as essences preceding actual existence and standing even quite apart from it. An archetypal status can be attributed to things as ideas in the mind of God before their creation. Duns’s predecessor Henry of Ghent considers such possibility as a necessary presupposition for everything that is actual. The distinction between essence as pure idea and existence as something more, as adding real existence to the mere idea, was borrowed from Avicenna. Along with it came the contemplation of a realm of possibilities as merely virtual entities. A whole order of the possible insinuates itself into the real as a prior condition of the actual. This gives rise to a world of contingency, of non-​necessary possibilities. It is modeled on God’s eternal knowledge of his creatures before the Creation. However, as apprehended by humans, this realm is the product of reflection. It is defined and controlled by our minds. Since it has no actual existence, such a virtual world exists only as, and by virtue of, projection of possibilities by the mind through reflection. Reflection invents a non-​actual world circumscribed by its own grid of determinate possibilities. This invasion and incipient colonization of the non-​actual has far-​reaching and fateful consequences. It results eventually in the erasure and forgetting of the indeterminate and unknowable, since it considers even what is not actual as nevertheless defined and known as a possibility. All that is not or is actually nothing is taken to exist already as divided up into determinate possibilities of existing. For Aristotle, only actuality, not potentiality, is susceptible of being known. Scotus, building on his predecessors, invents a knowledge of determinate possibilities that effectively sweeps away the vast unchartable realm of indeterminate potential by focusing attention on determinate possibilities that can be reflectively defined and thenceforth calculated. This will enable science eventually to construct a world of calculable contingencies and to forget the infinite, unknown depth of being preexisting all determinations. The infinite, uncircumscribable potentiality of the

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Coda on Scotus and Modality  181 actual world is thereby reduced to being contained by a mental schema and template. A chemistry formula may serve here as an illustration. Certain defined substances in contact with a defined catalyst produce a standard, describable chemical reaction. We think of these substances as precisely identified and specified mathematically by their molecular composition (H2O, CO2, etc.), but we ignore and abstract from the depth of their unique being in any actual instance. We consider them only insofar as they fit into our formulas. We invent a conceptually constructed world that conforms to our definitions and follows laws focused to reflect only the elements that are pre-​selected by our own formulations. This is how a world of formal entities is constructed by science, while the deeper roots of being in the unfathomably real are occulted. Why matter exists at all remains an unsoundable mystery, but it is one that no longer matters!

Possible Worlds and Possibility as Greater than Actuality Duns’s modal logic discerns a realm in which he can treat the possible as a kind of actuality. The possibility of contradiction is for Duns the criterion of unitary meaning. If simultaneous affirmation and negation of a proposition produces a contradiction, then it has a unitary meaning. This works only in a world of finite, definable entities because the infinite comprises all contradictions within itself. Most significantly, this theory of predication is based on possibility as being something real in itself, as having its own kind of reality. Abstract essences of things that might become real by actually existing, ideas that are coherent and do not contradict the idea of real existence, are recognized as having a reality of their own already just as essences. But, in this case, the distinction between essentia and esse, between essence and being, has to be explained as merely formal rather than as a difference between actually having, or not having, being. Avicenna’s principle concerning the first object of the intellect holds that “Being” (esse) is always understood implicitly together with any other being. Duns receives and builds on this doctrine. And here again the possible and virtual are recognized as real and actual because they are intellectually coherent and perhaps even necessary. This is the key to opening the new world of representation that Duns shares with Dante at the particular turning in intellectual history which they negotiate together, however divergently. Dante has created such possible worlds as fully actualized other worlds of the imagination. In effect, his use of this new modality of possibility enables him to imagine—​and to treat as fully actual—​the eschatological worlds of heaven, hell, and purgatory. We see the repercussions of the new investment in possibility in Dante also in what may seem to be merely academic arguments, for example, about angelology. Dante’s insistence that angels do not have, or at least do not need, memory (Paradiso XXIX.70–​81; Monarchia I.iii.7) concerns the greater dignity acruing to human intellect because of its potential.

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182  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity Whereas by Greek metaphysical standards, which exalt only the unchanging as fully actual, potentiality would be considered to belong to imperfection, Dante reevalutes potentiality positively as an enrichment bearing fruits that give human nature a certain kind of superiority over the angelic (“ardisco a dire che nobilitade umana, quanto è dalla parte di molti suoi frutti, quella dell’angelo soperchia,” Convivio IV.xix.6). Human nature discloses more possibilities for expressing the divine than simply mirroring back what it receives. Human nature instantiates the divine essence in enmattered variety, producing many different and diverse fruits, which gives it a special nobility (“molti e diversi frutti fanno nella umana nobilitade,” Convivio IV.xix.6). This assessment is bound up with Dante’s dynamic vision and representation of the other and eternal worlds. In this, he is a pathbreaker of modernity—​but also a bridge arching back to classical antiquity. The angels’ being without memory also indicates that they mirror God directly and without self-​reflection on their past, but in an immediate and uninterrupted—​or eternal—​cognition. Dante thus recognizes their knowing as superior to our self-​reflective knowing. But he also valorizes the thitherto unsuspected potential of self-​reflection, since it is by self-​ reflective rememoration that poetry contemplates all things, including immediate, angelic vision, and can produce something new. Self-​reflection defines the human condition, with all the special liabilities and possibilities that com-​plicate and differentiate it from the pure reflection enacted by the angels. The difference from Duns (or more exactly from Duns’s secularist heirs) is that Dante invents this new realm of self-​reflexively created possibility not as a substitute for any higher order of reality, but rather as its expression. He uses the new modal logic of possibles analogically, and thus in conjunction with theology, rather than absolutizing it as a logic of self-​reflection complete on its own terms. Oriented to theology, Dante still thinks essentially in the word. Modern logic, in contrast, wishes to abstract from language and to erase its own analogical foundations. Parts III and IV dig “archeologically” into the linguistic roots of self-​reflection and therewith of reasoning in general.1 Positive science, in contrast, will seek to leave natural language and its residues of the infinite and unfathomable behind for the sake of achieving a totally transparent, analytically self-​reflective system of (finite) existence.

1  I explore the “archeology of knowledge,” as practiced by Agamben following Foucault, in “Dante’s Theology and Contemporary Thought: Recovering Transcendence?” Special Issue of Forum Italicum, ed. Rachel Jakoff and Lino Pertile, forthcoming in 2021.

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36  Arabic Epistemology of Reflection of Transcendence

“Reflection” and “self-​reflection” are modern philosophical terms, but they reconfigure age-​old mental activities that were long familiar under other names. “Speculation” in the Middle Ages was a kind of poetic knowing through analogy with created, physical beings mirroring the metaphysical realm and serving as vehicles for the ascent to God. This is the path followed famously by Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum.1 Such mirror vision transpires “through clouds of corporeal likenesses” and is appropriate for us as finite, sensuous creatures. “Contemplation,” in contrast, was purely intellectual. For the mystic Richard of St Victor, speculation took place “when we perceive through a mirror, but contemplatio when we see the truth in its purity without any covering and veil of shadow.”2 The latter mode is like angelic vision. Any such rigid segregation, however, breaks down in Dante, who uses these terms sometimes interchangeably, elaborating on the “speculativa vita” of the angels under the rubric of the “contemplative life” as the “more excellent and divine” (Convivio II.iv.10–​13). Yet another crucial strand of medieval tradition emphasized the idea of self-​reflection as entailing integrally a reflection of theological transcendence. Islamic thinkers (and Jewish ones, eminently Maimonides, writing also in Arabic) in the centuries directly preceding Dante had developed this notion in precise philosophical and subtly theological terms. Dante’s deep debt to this Arabic-​Aristotelian philosophy is well known.3 It becomes explicit especially in his Convivio, notably books III and IV.xx–​xxi, for example, in the idea of intellectual perfection—​la 1 Robert Javelet, “Saint Bonaventure et Richard de Saint-​ Victor,” in Bonaventuriana. Miscellanea in onore di Guy Bougerol, ed. Chavero Blanco and Francisco de Asís (Rome: Antonianum, 1988), Part 1, 63–​96. 2  Dale M. Coulter, “Contemplation as ‘Speculation’: A Comparison of Boethius, Hugh of St Victor and Richard of St Victor,” in From Knowledge to Beatitude: St Victor, Twelfth-​ Century Scholars and Beyond. Essays in Honour of Grover A.  Zimm Jr., ed. E.  Ann Matter and Lesley Smith (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press 2013), 205, 210, 217, quoting Richard of St. Victor’s De arca mystica. 3  Gregory B. Stone, Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) demonstrates its centrality for Dante.

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184  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity felicità mentale—​as the epitome of happiness and the goal of human life. Following cues from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (K, 7, 177a), the perfection of the intellect by the philosopher counted as blessedness itself and even approached divinization. Islamic philosophers, furthermore, translating this into the terms of their revealed religion, viewed prophecy as a matter of intellectual perfection.4 Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–​1037) placed the prophet at the top of the ladder of knowledge as possessing the highest degree of receptivity to intelligible forms. For Avicenna, intellection presupposes a conversion of the soul to its Source. This movement is akin to that of the “separate intellects” or angels who intellectually intuit themselves only in turning to their Source. Intellection requires a conversion of the soul back to its Origin, for only by this conversion does the soul grasp itself. The soul must know itself in and through its Cause or Ground.5 Avicenna holds, moreover, that the intellect knows interiorly rather than exteriorly: it does not receive intelligibles from an external source, but rather reflects them by reflecting on itself and becoming transparent to itself, after the prophetic motto: “Whoever knows himself knows his Lord.” This reflection is a mirror relation that presupposes the simultaneous presence of the soul and the intelligible form that it reflects. If the soul turns away from the intelligible form, the image vanishes—​just as a mirror requires the presence in front of it of whatever it reflects. Nevertheless, the initiative for this relation comes ultimately from the intelligible world, which reflects itself in the mirror of human intellect. Self-​reflection is most fundamentally the activity of separate (divine) substances that use human intellects as their instruments for self-​reflection. Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–​98) advanced the thesis of the unity of intellect (which figures among the propositions condemned in 1277), according to which man is no longer the agent in thinking but is potentially a participant through an exceptional effort of “separate intellect” in the thinking of intellect itself and as such. “Intellect thinking itself” was the original and true form of all thinking. Humans, in their limited manner, only take part in it. Human thinking was thus essentially a mirroring of the thinking transpiring in the universal intellect that Averroes found in the “separate intellect” of Aristotle’s De Anima. Averroes’s most truly “great commentary” (but not “’l gran comento” of Inferno IV.144) in this regard is that on Book Λ of the Metaphysics, where Aristotle focuses

4  Didier Ottaviani, “La prophétie comme achèvement intellectuel à la fin du moyen âge,” Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle 21/​1 (2003): 11–​24. 5 Meryem Sebti, “Réceptivité et spéculation dans la noétique d’Avicenne,” in Miroir et savoir: La transmission d’un thème platonicien, des Alexandrins à la philosophie arabo-​musulmane (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008), 156, citing Avicenna’s Sifa, Métaphysique, ed. C.  G. Anawati et S.  Zayed (Cairo 1960), VIII, 7, page  369. Sebti works this out in more detail in Avicenne. L’âme humaine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 113–​24.

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Arabic Epistemology of Reflection  185 on thought thinking (or mirroring) itself as the most pleasurable of activities.6 Only intellect that is always in act, unlike ours, can fully enjoy the pleasure of thinking, and it is at its most intense in thinking of thinking itself. Man’s becoming, like the angels, a mirror of divinity was fundamental to the mystical itinerary to God of Islamic thinkers in the Sufi tradition. Al-​Ghazali (1058–​1111) builds on Avicenna’s theories in order to exalt the religious, revealed, inspired aspect of knowledge in this perspective in which knowing has to pass through and derive from the unity of divinity, which, however, cannot be properly conceived by finite minds. There is thus always an element of unknowing that is built in at the foundations of any knowing exercised by human beings. This predicament of un/​ knowing is expressed in the Islamic tradition by the mirror analogy, with its structure of triangulation through a transcendent term. Speculation thereby renders possible a kind of union of created with increate being—​ such as is realized especially in the ecstatic state famously by Al-​Hallaj and Al-​Bistami. However, the mirror analogy enfolds a reminder that revealed knowledge furnishes a likeness and does not exhaust the reality of God, who remains the Unknowable.7 Al-​Ghazali, as mystical philosopher, champions a knowledge by illumination that simply falls from God into the soul. Still, he is careful to avoid conflating image and reality. Rational knowledge of divinity remains distinct from simple mirror reflection: discursive knowing of causes is not the same as immediate reception of truth as a whole.8 But which is superior? There is here a deep-​seated tension between philosophical and mystical ways of knowing. Is the perfect mirror purely passive, or does the created intellect contribute to the object known by becoming that object itself? In either case, Islamic philosophy’s greatest breakthrough toward modernity, which is picked up and developed by Dante and his tradition, is the notion that intellectual knowing (tahqiq) is “to know things by verifying and realizing their truth and reality for oneself. One cannot verify the truth and reality of things without knowing them first hand, in one’s own soul, without any help from anyone other than God.”9 In experiential or “intellectual,” as opposed to transmitted, knowledge (taqlid), 6 Averroes, Grand commentaire de la métaphysique, ed. M. Bouygues (Beyrouth: Dar el-​ Machreq Éditeurs, 1990), 3rd ed. 7 Alexander Treiger, Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought: Al-​ Ghazālī’s Theory of Mystical Cognition and its Avicennian Foundation (New York: Routledge, 2012), 31–​33. 8  See Jules Janssens, “L’âme-​mirroir: Al-​Gazali entre philosophie et mysticisme,” Miroir et savoir, 214, 217. 9  William C. Chittick, Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul: The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 23. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989) recuperates this type of knowledge, which he often calls “recollection,” as it is practiced in an encyclopedic range of world religions.

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186  Self-Reflection: Middle Ages to Modernity the human soul knows by directly reflecting divine truth in itself. And it knows itself in this same (self)reflection. True self-​knowledge knows the nothingness of the self and the absoluteness of the Other that it can know at first only as Nothing. In this approach to self-​reflection, monotheism leads toward an “existentialist” conceiving of the self in relation to an Other who is absolute and not just our idea. This knowing of nothing, moreover, opens a space for the operation of the imagination. Imaginative construction is necessary in order to make an image of what is properly speaking invisible. Al-​Farabi (c. 870–​950) developed a theory of symbolic expression based on ontological analogy that presupposes a participative relationship between being and beings beyond all that finite definitions can contain. Words working analogically on the mind prefigure transcendent realities.10 This bridging prophetically to the transcendent through the imagination was modeled by Ibn Arabi (1165–​1241) in relation to Al Khadir, his protecting angel. An immediate heavenly connection frees the imagination, as intellectual, to be a truly poetic and productive imagination rather than remaining strictly bound by the senses, as in Aristotle. This conception of imagination in Ibn Arabi owes much also to the Persian theosophist and martyr Suhrawardi (1155–​91) with his “interworld” of images and archetypes.11 Direct knowledge of reality in its absoluteness (haqq)—​as opposed to knowledge that one takes ready-​made and formulated from others, without repeating and verifying it in one’s own experience—​is one of the essential aspects of the knowledge through self-​reflection that Dante develops by appropriating insights of Islamic philosophy. This heritage is a mighty challenge to the passing along of information bites that dominates the economy of knowledge in our electronic age. A  strong line of continuity connects Dante with Islamic intellectual wisdom in its potential for mounting a fundamental critique of modernity. The ensuing parts of the present book leverage this tradition indirectly through Dante in constructing the genealogy of an alternative modernity.

10  Philippe Vallat, “Vraie philosophe et faux prophète selon Farabi: Aspects historiques et théoriques de l’art du symbole,” Miroir et savoir, 117–​43. 11 Henri Corbin expounds this “mundus immaginalis”: https://​hermetic.com/​moorish/​ mundus-​imaginalis. Accessed August 21, 2018.

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PART III

The Origin of Language in Reflection and the Breaking of its Circuits Overcoming the Age of Representation through Repetition

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37  The Tradition of Self-​Reflection and Modern Self-​Forgetting

Humanities studies, as means of self-​reflection, are an urgently needed antidote to the self-​forgetting that plagues the modern age of representation sketched in Part II in its philosophical origins. The injunction “Know thyself” (γνῶθι σεαυτόν)—​the oracle inscribed in the portico (pronaos) of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, according to Pausanias, and taken by Socrates as the motto for his activity of self-​questioning—​expresses the founding charter of the humanities.1 For Socrates, it entailed knowing that he knew nothing (Apology 20c–​24e), and it resonates down through subsequent tradition as enjoining a knowledge of human limits and particularly of human mortality. Stemming from another main root of this tradition, Ecclesiastes’s great paeon on time (“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” etc.) also recognizes the capability of mortals to envision their temporal limits and know their own vanity (“vanity of vanities; all is vanity”). The tantalizing phrase “he hath set the world [or eternity] in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end” (3:11) registers our negative capability of reflecting on our own ignorance vis-​à-​vis our origin and destiny. Thinking one’s own limit is thinking, at least potentially, also beyond oneself. From these classic touchstones, authentic self-​reflection emerges as entailing not a focus on the self as object or “end-​in-​itself” (Zweck-​an-​ sich in Kant’s moral vocabulary) so much as a meditative realization of one’s own limits to the end of letting the world beyond them—​negatively, “eternity”—​come into view. The self, despite its contingency and transience, habitually measures all by itself and focuses everything through its own finite lenses. Only when the resulting distortion is dispelled by self-​reflective insight into the relativity and ephemerality of the ego can reality begin to show itself as it is—​or in its absoluteness. Self-​reflection is, to this extent, self-​ relativization. Such reflection by the self on itself makes it emerge as no

1  Donald Phillip Verene, Philosophy and the Return to Self-​Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) offers a kindred interpretation centered in Socratic humanism.

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190  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits longer the unremarked, invisible filter through which all else is reduced to just a figment of the self. The infinite cannot appear so long as everything is known only as reflected by the finite self. This is why our infatuation with technology as a positive, objective projection of our self-​empowerment undermines authentic self-​awareness.2 Symptomatic of self-​oblivion and blindness to our mortality, such infatuation comes with and from our forgetting of who we are as bodily and mortal beings. Genuine self-​reflection takes place, instead, in and through language before language has devolved into just a tool—​a type of machinery for manipulating the objective world. More originarily, language is a medium and mediation that enables us to reflect on our being in its fathomless totality, which exceeds objective definition. The same can be said of each of our sense modalities. As Blake admonished, “We are led to believe a lie /​When we see with, not thro’ the eye” (“Auguries of Innocence”). In the medium of language, as in a mirror, either we can see ourselves merely as objects, or we can see through this reflected image so as to contemplate what is not representable. Already in Purgatorio XXVII.100–​ 108, the mirrors of Leah and Rachel, designated as “specchio” and “miraglio” respectively, distinguish typologically between objective, workaday seeing and contemplative seeing through to the dimension in which all appears infinite. Miraglio’s derivation from Provençal mirahl recalls its connection with Troubadour poetry, where we have already discerned a self-​ reflective self-​ transcendence budding (section 5). Language thereby enables us to contemplate our temporal destiny to no longer exist as material bodies in this world—​and to peer negatively beyond this limit. Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” is based on the “godlike” capability given us through “such large discourse” of “Looking before and after” (IV.iv.33–​38). Language enables us consciously to reflect on our possibly not existing—​on death, and thereby on a world beyond and without us. It opens the negative dimension of the in-​ finite. Knowing one’s own ignorance, or unknowing, is a way of glimpsing something infinite and whole (at least in our perception of it) that is inevitably missed in every articulated knowing of a definable object. For Nicholas of Cusa, as for Franz Rosenzweig, we “know” “God” precisely in knowing our insuperable ignorance of God. Awareness of reality as a whole begins for us only with this relatively undeceived form of self-​reflective self-​knowing. However, when conceptualized and verbalized, even such self-​reflective knowing becomes ineluctably closed and reductive. Therefore, linguistic self-​reflection must culminate by negating itself.

2 On our technological narcissism, compare Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), Chapter 4: “The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis.”

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Self-Reflection and Modern Self-Forgetting  191 Poets sometimes intuit that only the pre-​reflective consciousness of the animal can experience the Open without and before language. In Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy, lack of language and of consciousness of death, opens the awareness of animals to “God” standing before them (“vor sich Gott”). Reality to them is infinite (“unendlich”) and open (“offen”). In the Paradiso, Dante employs self-​reflexive means in order to approach a pre-​reflexive consciousness. While he does so especially through the figure of the suckling infant, the canticle also abounds in animal images.3 They capture the spontaneity and immediate consciousness of the blessed and their beatitude, for example, in introducing Adam through the simile of an animal whose affect is directly manifest in the movement of the covering that conceals it (XXVI.97–​ 102). Self-​ reflection, in Dante’s journey, ultimately dissolves itself and opens into immediate consciousness without reflection or difference: it becomes one with “God.” Self-​ reflection is thus paradoxically both the impediment to our consciousness of God and its indispensable means. We need it humanly in order to “transhumanize.”

Self-​Negating and Self-​Transcending Self-​Reflection Self-​ reflection in the Middle Ages was pursued to great speculative heights, particularly by philosophers in the Arabic-​Aristotelian tradition that saturated Dante’s intellectual ambience. They emphasized a positive side of self-​reflection as true knowledge and as a way of realizing one’s immortality, albeit not necessarily for an individual so much as for universal mind. This approach, too, decisively shapes Dante’s philosophical thought in his treatises and perdures as a horizon of his total vision. For Dante, however, consonant with the Bible, true self-​knowledge passes finally by way of death and a descent into hell entailing a complete deconstruction of ego-​self—​before it leads upward to resurrection in an individual body and to immortal life and light. Dante takes on board this darker, deeper heritage of self-​reflection as a deliberate exercise in dying. Self-​reflection is prone to melancholy and death—​as Ovid’s rendering of the Narcissus myth makes crystal clear. The bitter fate of Narcissus prefigures the nihilistic destination of philosophy and therewith of self-​reflection in the Western speculative tradition wherever self-​reflection is carried out as sufficient unto itself and without rupture opening it to an Outside. However, another possibility based on employing the imagination in self-​reflection animated by blind contact and openness to an unfathomable Other points reflection in quite another direction. Dante manages to encompass and unite

3 This abundance is made evident by Giuseppe Ledda, “Animali nel ‘Paradiso’,” in La poesia della natura nella “Divina Commedia,” ed. Giuseppe Ledda (Ravenna: Centro Dantesco dei Frati Minori Conventuali, 2009), 93–​135.

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192  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits both of these tendencies looming at the aurora of modern thought in its multivalent potential. He thereby dramatizes the profound ambiguity of self-​reflection. Two modern philosophers, Hegel and Heidegger, distinguish themselves as having continued in the tradition of making reflection on human mortality fundamental to the task of philosophy. Heidegger explicates human existence or Dasein, “Being-​ there,” as essentially Being-​ unto-​ death (Sein-​zum-​Tod). And Hegel’s Absolute is based on reflection on the nullity of our sensuous being as enshrined in the rites of Ceres observed even by the beasts: they are not mesmerized by the things before them but rather “eat them up” (“zehren sie auf”), as he charmingly puts it in Chapter 1 of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Only such concrete realization of the finitude of human existence enables it to complete itself as an infinite whole, a completed circuit of self-​reflection.4 The apparently objective reality of things is eaten up by time and is turned by conscious reflection into an event that can be made to reflect on itself—​in and through language. This reflection, then, is no longer bound by time; instead, it has a structure complete in itself as self-​reflection. Hegel is the modern thinker par excellence who would bind everything into a comprehensive system by the bond of self-​reflection, but he also exposes its limits in the mortal creature. Heidegger stands at the departure point launching into postmodern thinking, where self-​reflection breaks down and becomes obsessed with its insurmountable inability to be complete on its own terms alone. Self-​reflection shows itself to be but a means of approach to what is not the self and not reflection either as we know them. Plying self-​reflection to the limit of discovering an Absolute that pries reflection open to its Other is the feat we saw Dante’s lyrical language performing in Part I. In Part II, we traced self-​reflection forward to its modern realization eventually in a techno-​ scientific apocalypse, but we also discerned in Dante the premises of an alternative modernity in which self-​reflection points outside itself to relate to an Other in a religious dimension. In secular modernity, self-​reflection becomes merely a means of constructing a self-​enclosed sphere of immanence rather than (as for Dante and his tradition) a challenge placing us face to face with unassimilable alterity. Our now post-​secular times enable us once again to see this other legacy that was there from the origins of modern thought with Dante. We aim in Part III to comprehend this alternative in terms of the (theological) mystery of language by considering later philosophical elaborations of what was first manifest intuitively in Dante’s invention of a self-​reflexive lyrical language that reflects transcendent divinity. In what follows, philosophical formulations of this dialectic alternate with 4 This is argued influentially by Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), especially Appendix II: “L’idée de la mort dans la philosophie de Hegel.”

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Self-Reflection and Modern Self-Forgetting  193 analyses of its historical instantiations as illuminated by or as radiating from Dante’s Paradiso. Our mastering all reality as our resource so that we see only ourselves and our own needs and purposes reflected everywhere disenchants the world and produces a dead natural order consisting merely of matter in motion. This is our modern, Enlightenment heritage. However, self-​ reflection can also be the means by which we gain critical distance on this production of an ersatz world of formal, linguistically defined, spectral (non-​)entities. By transcendental self-​reflection, we can take critical cognizance of our own intellectual process in producing this grid of dead abstractions, and this shows the path leading back to the mystery of life within us and all around us. Self-​reflection is the source of a deadening plague of totalizing rationalization—​ as well as its remedy. It is the pharmakon, if ever there was one—​and, in fact, the most indispensable prescription underlying them all. Our speculative heritage of transcendental self-​ reflection, of recursively reflecting on our reflection itself, puts self-​reflection in a perspective of critical awareness of human limits that lets reality again emerge in its own integrity as preexisting all our relativizing, and finally totalizing, human determinations. Rather than seeing only the same—​ourselves—​ everywhere we look, we see even in ourselves the Unknown and Other. Of course, this maneuver, too, is humanly determined—​but in a self-​negating and self-​transcending mode. Negative theology is a form of reflection par excellence that prepares through radically self-​critical self-​reflection for encounter with the absolutely Other. Dante’s Paradiso embodies (negative) theology in poetic language that richly reveals self-​reflection’s ability to reflect on itself in such a way as to open up to and reflect this Other.

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38  The Original Event of Language in Modern Lyric Tradition

Language is absolute not in anything that it denotes or designates by its ineluctably differential logic, but rather in what it is as an event of being. This event is what we must return to self-​reflexively in order to ponder the origin of anything meaningful, including the world itself. However, this ontological event of language cannot be characterized in existing terms of any language. We cannot grasp what it is, but only that it is. To this end, Giorgio Agamben studies particularly the way that language—​and exemplarily the language of lyric—​points to the place of its own taking-​place.1 Agamben reads the Troubadours as showing that the place of origin of the poetic word can be indicated only negatively. It is experienced as nothing. Agamben brings to focus in the poem the negativity of the origin of language from the experience of the abyss—​or of no pre-​established meaning or given object. The poem triggers an experience of the nihil. This is made explicit by the Troubadour songs themselves. The nihil is expressly the theme of the tenzo by Troubadour Aimeric de Peguilhan and Albertet de Sisteron—​ who is cited by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia II.vi.6 as affording an example of the highest type of poetic construction. Mas ieu faz zo q’anc om non fes, tenzon d’aizo qi res non es; q’a razon pro m respondrias, mas al nien vueil respondatz; et er la tenzos de non-​re.

     (VI.1.9)

(But I am doing what no man ever did, making a tenzo of what is nothing; you would surely respond to a razo, but I want you to respond to nothing; it is the tenzo of nothing.) 1 Giorgio Agamben, Il linguaggio e la morte: Un seminario sul luogo della negatività (Turin: Einaudi, 1982).

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Language in Modern Lyric Tradition  195 The art of the Troubadour is the art of finding—​literally trobar—​the word as it springs from its place of origin in Nothing. As the invention of an original language, poetry in a certain sense creates from nothing. This is not quite creation ex nihilo in the theological sense, for poetry shapes language taken as a material that already exists. It is rather an art of “making” (poiesis), and its means are considered traditionally within the frame of rhetoric. Classically, the poetic topos is the place of the origin of language, of the emergence of the word from inarticulate no-​thing. As such, language is understood to be a metaphysical revelation, a revelation of being itself. As Émile Benveniste shows in Problèmes de linguistique générale, the Aristotelian categories are categories of language, but not of language in the modern, nominalist sense of only a representation of something that exists independently. They are rather to be understood as originary revelation—​or as a showing forth of the possibilities and modalities of being itself. The Aristotelian categories (substance, accident, quantity, quality, relation, etc.) reveal not fixed forms of language so much as language in its emergence as the showing forth and originary articulation of being. After Aristotle, however, classical rhetoric generally presupposed language as something already given. The “art of invention” (ars inveniendi) was a process of finding and selecting the right tropes from among those available: Latin tropus and tropare are connected etymologically also with trobar in the sense of “find”—​as in the French “trouver.” This classical conception of “topics”—​beginning from Aristotle’s Topics—​had devolved from the experience of the event of language as a shining forth of the word, an “argumentum” (from argentum, silver, hence connoting a flash of insight), to a technique of memory that operates by rummaging through linguistic commonplaces or loci communi. In the more original sense, we could say that what is produced by the art of trobar is a “work” (in French travail  =  Spanish trabajo) as well as a “find” (trouvaille). The Troubadours, according to Agamben, rediscover in these terms the experience of the origin or “event” of language. The Provençal poets, at the dawn of modern poetry, thereby surpass classical topics. Specifically through Amor, they attain to an original experience of the event of the word. At stake in courtly song is not psychological or biographical experience—​as reflected in the razos and vidas that spring up around the Troubadour poems to introduce and comment on them—​so much as an ontological event of language. Agamben traces the razo de trobar, or the art of composition in Provençal poetry, from the ratio inveniendi, the art of invention of classical rhetoric. The topical word may, of course, be found by the mnemonic techniques of rhetoric as already given, but more originarily the word springs from amorous desire as invention of the new.

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196  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits The Troubadours experience the event of language as love, as Amor or desire understood in a sense derived in part from Augustinian inner illumination or inspiration. This event exceeds words; it is even liable to being cancelled or reversed by being glossed in words. This glossing takes shape particularly with the razos and vidas that supply prose interpretations of the Troubadours’ lives and works.2 They are a later accretion of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They were composed in Italy at a significant remove from the origin of Troubadour poetry in Occitanea, even if they are written in the Old Provençal language. Like the Vita nuova’s ragioni, the Provençal razos can state the reasons or causes that give rise to the poetry, as well providing commentary on it. As delineated by Gregory Stone, the naming of the Troubadours—​ giving them their particular historical identities—​was their death.3 Such naming occurred first in the razos and vidas, once they began to appear, supplying authors’ lives and circumstantial commentaries as background for the songs. But in its primordial form, Troubadour song was rather anonymous and universal. It was anyone’s and everyone’s song, independently of any individual identity or life story. Such song, at its core, is simply language itself in the sense of a universal paradigm or “grammar”—​the rules and paradigms that enable speech. The referent of song is not historically determinate: the song can be recited by anyone anywhere and has no fixed meaning. Stories, in contrast, are about individual protagonists, and they grow old like the persons they are about. But song is perpetually new: a breaking out into song understands itself as without reason or antecedent history. Stone quotes Jean Renart (twelfth–​thirteenth century), who plants melodies—​ chans (songs) and sons (sounds)—​in his narrative romance Le roman de la Rose, or Guillaume de Dole (early thirteenth century) in order that it may be always a “new thing” (“une nouvele chose”) and “new every day” (“nouviaus toz jors”). To give song a particular origin in an author and a life story is its death. When the pro-​nomen, the generic pronoun “I,” becomes a nomen, a name, the impersonal singing voice becomes an individual subject, and the Troubadour dies. In this perspective, Troubadour lyric shows up as originally not a communication of a particular speaker but rather an impersonal song repeating the origin of language as such.4 This is implicitly the perspective of Catalun Troubadour Raimon Vidal’s Occitan grammatical treatise Las razos de trobar (c. 1200). The poetry’s true object is the universal

2  Biographies des Troubadours: Textes provençaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, ed. Jean Boutière and Alexander H. Schutz (Toulouse: Édouard Privat, 1950). 3  Gregory B. Stone, The Death of the Troubadour: The Late Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 1–​12. 4  See, further, Paul Zumthor, Speaking of the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) and Leo Spitzer, “Note on the Poetic and Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors,” Traditio 4 (1946): 414–​22.

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Language in Modern Lyric Tradition  197 language of lyric more than facts about individual poets. However, the two are made to interpenetrate by Dante in his deepening of the quest for the origin of language through theological-​existential reflection. Particularly with Dante’s Vita nuova, the poetic impersonality of Troubadour lyric becomes individual and autobiographical by implicating a real historical subject.5 Dante invests heavily in the biographical contextualizing of his poems in the Vita nuova, but at the same time he heightens their orientation to a transcendent mystery. They remain universal utterances in spite of the narrative frame imposed on them. Dante combines and adapts the genres of the cansos, vidas, razos, and also grammars (whence the divisioni) to produce his own unique amalgam.6 This hybrid genre—​at the simplest level the prosimetron—​has proved to be something of an enigma occasioning the most divergent interpretations. Nonetheless, it clearly demonstrates Dante’s penchant for creating a summa of all genres available to him in the cultural field in which he works. Implicated is surely—​and centrally—​also the turn to nothingness that marks song since its inception (as explored previously in section 6). Dante’s experience in the Vita nuova builds up to and ends with the Void created by Beatrice’s death. Dante’s libello suspends its quest in expectant waiting for the revelation of other means of access to its now glorified Lady (XLII). With all its self-​reflective mirrorings, the Vita nuova produces a detailed portrait of Dante himself, yet it yearns toward someone (w)hol(l)y O/​other.

The Individual and the Other—A Mirror Relation According to a well-​ worn historiography of the Renaissance, self-​ reflexivity in modern times brings about the apotheosis of the individual, and Dante plays a crucial role as the “first modern European individual.” However, in pre-​Renaissance times, self-​reflexivity is first and foremost an apotheosis of language itself. Self-​reflexivity is synonymous with universality and a bending back to transcendent origins. This is the deeper sense of Troubadour and Trouvère lyric. These manifestations of courtly culture are not just proto-​Renaissance phenomena heralding the birth of the autonomous individual through reflexivity of subjective voice and consciousness. They enact a reflexive circularity of song expressing a universal being and love that reach back to and repeat cosmic harmonies. The lyric voice aims to reflect and repeat the cosmos’s timeless patterns rather than to disrupt them through individual originality. In the birth of 5  Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 120–​44. 6  Elizabeth Wilson Poe, From Poetry to Prose in Old Provençal: The Emergence of the Razos, the Vidas, and Razos De Trobar (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1984), Chapter V: “The Poetics of Copying: The Scribe as Artist in the Chansonniers and Dante’s Vita Nuova.”

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198  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits the new sense of the individual, most important is self-​reflection’s relating the finite structure of a particular person to the abyss of the non-​identity from which reflection emerges and in which it remains grounded. As such, rather than foregrounding individual or subjective identity, self-​ reflexivity effects an opening to the infinite and nameless—​to no-​thing.7 The new age of individualism can be interpreted as either gain or loss. Surely it is both: it demands consideration under its different aspects and with regard to a variety of different problematics. Dante pioneers a dawning age of individual self-​expression. However, reflexivity in his poetry belongs on both sides of any historical watershed marking the emergence of individual self-​expression and self-​assertion. Dante’s self-​ reflectiveness carries with it still a primary relation to transcendence and divinity. This relation to an infinitely Other—​the Altrui that asserts itself peremptorily in saving Dante (Purgatorio I.133) but not Ulysses (Inferno XXVI.141)—​is the fundamental structure that discriminates productive or virtuous forms of individualism from its vicious deformations. The same phrase “as pleased another” (“com altrui piacque”) is used in both passages and emphasizes the close proximity of the two epic heroes even in diametrically opposing them. This comparison between two types of self-​reflection and their manner of being conditioned by an Other likewise demarcates metaphysics that are stifling from those that open toward unlimited new and creative conceptions of self and world. There is a reductive reflectiveness that posits the self, taken just for itself, as foundation and as unaware of its intrinsic nullity. But there is also a reflectiveness that opens concepts of self and God alike to endless mediation and open-​ended exploration. Even before the modern subject, a certain ambiguity hovers over self-​reflexivity. It can lead to transcendent reference acknowledging God and the world, but it can also lead to the hell of impenetrable self-​enclosure. Subjectivity, in this inherent ambiguity, is made the object of profound philosophical reflection in the German tradition by Meister Eckhart, who parallels Dante as the outstanding pioneer of a cultured and creative use of vulgar speech.8 Vernacular speculative prose, like the lyric tradition of self-​reflexivity (especially from Petrarch), is marked by this same ambiguity along a genealogical line that can be traced through Vico to Hegel and Heidegger.9 The poetic modes of self-​reflection first disclose the field of possibilities that are then analyzed in philosophy. Poets in the wake of Dante, furthermore, counterpoint philosophy with a trajectory of self-​reflection rooted

7  Daniel Heller-​Roazen, No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming (New York: Zone Books, 2017) focuses linguistic modalities of reflexivity relating to infinity. 8  Rubina Giorgi, Dante e Meister Eckhart: Letture per tempo della fine (Salerno: Ripostes, 1987) and Karl-​Otto Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico, 79f, 98f and passim develop this parallel. 9  Rocco Rubini, The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 34–​38, 346–​55, 360–​61.

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Language in Modern Lyric Tradition  199 in medieval tradition. This path of humanist reflection continues among a certain line of modern poets.10 They stand in continuity with Dante’s endeavor to actualize truth through reflection of beauty.11 The aesthetic comes into its own, yet not as abandon of the metaphysical quest, but rather as a new dimension for the latter’s realization—​now in a subjectively self-​reflective mode. The background in Provençal poetry and the new lyric subject remain seminal still for the development of modernist poetics by Ezra Pound and his circle.12 These further developments provide illuminating lenses for viewing the emergence in the Middle Ages of a theory of poetic language as self-​reflective of its own event or “taking-​place.”

10 Marion Montgomery, The Reflective Journey Toward Order: Essays on Dante, Wordsworth, Eliot, and Others (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008). 11 Maurizio Malaguti, “In trasparenza: La bellezza come via alla verità. Percorsi nel Paradiso di Dante” (Filosofi d’oggi per Dante), Letture classensi 32–​ 34 (Ravenna: Longo, 2005), 109–​29. Mira Mocan, La transparenza e il riflesso: Sull’alta fantasia in Dante e nel pensiero medievale (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007). 12  Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (London: J.M. Dent, 1910).

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39  The New Rhetoric of Reflexivity in Geoffrey de Vinsauf

Arguably the most provocative medieval rhetorical theorist of the new art form that takes shape in Troubadour poetry is Geoffrey de Vinsauf (fl. 1200). Self-​reflexivity for Geoffrey, as for many modern theorists to follow, is bound up with a kind of evacuation of proper or literal meaning or determinate reference. The very emptiness of extrinsic content is understood from the outset to invest self-​reflection with unlimited potential for productive creativity of images and fecundity in non-​identical tropings and conceptual creation. This is the horizon for Geoffrey’s treatment in his Poetria nova (ca. 1210) of the problem of reflexivity in a form illuminating the origin of a modern poetics already in the midst of the Middle Ages.1 Already Geoffrey is obsessed with novitas, or with making the old new (rejuvenatio). Formal innovation and verbal renovation are the very life of literature, its perpetual rejuvenation. Some new inflection in its use gives the obsolete (caduc) term a wholly new lease on life making it, in effect, “modern.” The treatise’s orientation to opening in original ways a precocious modernity has been emphasized by modern critics.2 Alexandre Leupin presents Geoffrey’s project as self-​consciously inaugurating a programmatically new approach to poetics.3 Leupin stresses especially the blurring of content and form in Geoffrey’s discourse as theoretical but at the same time richly and often enigmatically poetic. Geoffrey’s work abundantly employs the figures it explicates. This means that the newness in question is generated precisely by engines of self-​reflection, by implicit reflection 1  English text available in Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, trans. Margaret F. Nims, rev. ed. Martin Camargo (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2010). However, I have myself translated directly from the Latin text in Godofredo de Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, ed. Ana Calvo Revilla (Madrid: Arco Libros, 2009). 2  Ernest Gallo, ed., The Poetria Nova and Its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). 3 Alexandre Leupin, “Absolute Reflexivity: Geoffrey de Vinsauf,” ed. Laurie A.  Finke and Martin B. Schichtman, Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). Reprinted and revised in Alexander Leupin, Barbarolexis: Medieval Writing and Sexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Citations are from the former.

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Reflexivity in Geoffrey de Vinsauf  201 of the work on and by its own style. Though presented in the guise of a technical and pedagogical manual, “the Poetria nova actually transforms its own doctrine into a metaphoric veil for the speculative and specular enterprise that is its true aim” (Leupin, 121). Specular self-​reflection drives Geoffrey’s rhetoric of novelty. In these optics, poetry as radical fingere opens into a “bottomless specularity” (123). Geoffrey discovers and attempts to trace “the reflexive movements of this specular dynamism” (122). Leupin underlines the fact that the figure of transumptio for Geoffrey is attached to no proper meaning but is an empty space of exchange between one figure and another, a mere “intermediate step, signifying nothing in itself but proffering transition” (“medius gradus, nihil ipse significans sed praebens transitum”), in words borrowed from Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria 8.6.38. The upshot is that the transumptio functions like a mirror for self-​reflection: Talis transumptio verbi Est tibi pro speculo: quia te specularis in illo Et proprias cognoscis oves in rure alieno

           (802–​ 4)

(Such a metaphorical use of a word serves you as a mirror: for you see yourself reflected in it And recognize your own sheep in an alien landscape.) However, as Leupin points out, the mirror or speculum “is no more than an absence.” Pure reflexivity makes everything a revelation of what is absolutely other to any possible description. Leupin puts this in terms that match our description of poetry at its modern origins: “As the blank depth of writing, the mirror has no meaning per se, but by its very vacuity allows objects (the two terms of a comparison, poetry and history, etc.) to reveal what is radically other in each of them” (138). Hence, in conclusion, “Geoffrey of Vinsauf theorizes the speculum as that which reveals alterity in and of itself” (140). This models the opening to otherness that we have discovered as produced, paradoxically, by self-​reflection in the practice of the lyric by Dante and his Troubadour predecessors. In Fiction et incarnation, his broad, speculative synthesis of medieval literary thought and theology, Leupin views Geoffrey’s poetics of self-​reflexivity as ushering in the modern scientific age.4 Leupin connects the origin of modern science to Christianity by stressing the doctrine of the Incarnation as the fundamental “epistemological break” (“coupure 4  Alexandre Leupin, Fiction et incarnation: Litérature et théologie au moyen âge (Paris: Flammarion, 1993).

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202  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits épistémologique,” 7–​18) that distinguishes the West and enables it to develop its empirical science and applied technology. But on its other, complementary side, this same age of self-​reflection is also the age of fiction. Leupin traces this birth of modernity to the Middle Ages and specifically to their drawing out the consequences of the Incarnation in the domains of both science and literature (“… le Moyen Âge, en tant qu’il s’efforça de tirer les consequences de l’Incarnation, est bien le lieu de naissance de notre proper modernité dans le domaine de la littérature aussi bien que de la science,” 18). The idea that divine perfection could enter, inhabit, redeem, and perfect the material, mundane universe was a revelation and reversal of all ancient philosophies, an irreparable rupture in what, to this extent, is wrongly designated as a unitary Western tradition. Leupin works from Alexandre Koyré, who articulates an historical understanding of modern science as building on medieval-​Scholastic scientific breakthroughs.5 Koyré in turn draws on Alexandre Kojève, for whom modern science originates uniquely in Christian culture, having been rendered possible by the Christian doctrine of Incarnation.6 This cultural watershed of the Incarnation has been underscored specifically in relation to Dante.7 In the Incarnation of God in Christ, the dialectic of self-​reflection breaks open to an immediacy—​the concrete presence of the Absolute—​that Dante interprets poetically and theologically. Science and poetry emerge in modernity as complementary ways in which self-​ reflection constructs the objectively real (compare section 28) under the sign of a theology of the Incarnation.

5  Alexandre Koyré, “Les origines de la science modern: Une interpretation nouvelle,” in Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 61–​86. 6  Alexandre Kojève, “L’origine chrétienne de la science moderne,” in Mélanges offerts à Alexandre Koyré (Paris: Hermann, 1964), vol. 2, 295–​306. 7 Guy P.  Raffa, Divine Dialectic: Dante’s Incarnational Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

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40  Poetic Self-​Referentiality as Creative Source—​From Paradiso to les Symbolistes

Dante, like Geoffrey, poetically expresses a non-​ objectifiable reality: paradisiacal lyric imitates the invisible and unrepresentable. This is one important element perhaps in spiritual poetry and in art generally. As Paul Klee wrote, “Art does not render the visible but renders visible” (“Kunst gibt nicht das sichtbare wider, sondern macht sichtbar”).1 Among language arts, poetry is at its intensest in lyric because of the attenuation of referential content, which tends to be subsumed into pure form. Even rich representation in lyric counts more for its form than for its content. This is especially true of poetry that pursues a vocation to become pure poetry, poésie pure—​as in the French symbolistes and especially for their tutelary god, Stéphane Mallarmé. It holds still for their self-​elected heir, Paul Valéry, for whom all creation comes from the “inexhaustible Me” (“inépuisable Moi,” “Fragments du Narcisse”).2 This recognition leads, however, in two opposed directions. Mallarmé’s Narcissus figures (particularly Narcisse and Hérodiade) circle upon themselves in the void, where “nothing will take place but the place” (“rien n’aura lieu que le lieu,” Coup de dès). To this ironic and mythic treatment, André Gide counterposes the saturated symbols of an autoerotic religion in his 1891 Le traité du Narcisse: Théorie du symbole, dedicated to Paul Valéry as author of “Narcisse parle” (1891). Gide’s Narcissus is a contemplative mystic, “grave et religieux.” For Gide, narcissism is the basis of an aesthetic religion expressed in a generalized symbolism.3 Already in the Paradiso, for all its richly political, autobiographical, and religious content, Dante is pursuing the poetic word in its purity, thematizing poetry itself as, at some level, the subject of the poem. His lyric language makes language itself the theme of poetry in ways that modern poetry will never cease to repeat and explore. His writing “poetry about

1 Klee, Schöpferische Konfession (1918). Kunst-​Lehre: Aufsätze, Vorträge, Rezensionen und Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, ed. Günther Regel (Leipzig: Reclam, 1991), 60. 2  René Fromilhague, “Sur la poésie pure de Paul Valéry,” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 76/​3 (May–​June, 1976): 393–​441. 3 Kristeva, Histoires d’amour, 170, treats Gide from this angle.

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204  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits poetry” begins in an autobiographical vein in the Vita nuova.4 This process continues in the Commedia, where Dante names and elaborately singularizes, historicizes, and personalizes the voice that sings in lyric. It is autobiographical, yet it also transcends this determination in order to become anonymous and hymn-​like. The poetry of the Paradiso rises to the height of devotional music offering up a liturgy in celebration of the Creator.5 The God who is so celebrated is, in theological terms, transcendent, but poetically he is made absolutely immanent. God as Word is revealed and concretely actualized or made verbally incarnate through self-​reference in poetry as epitomizing a fundamental aspect of the nature of language in general. This makes the divine word also transcendent of every object within the world—​for reasons that we have been at pains to demonstrate. Self-​reference, as it emerges specifically in Dante’s language, enacts an inclusive logic of immanent self-​transcendence. Self-​reference in Dante’s language draws attention to the taking-​place of language, to the “place” where language originates—​to the enunciating in which meaning becomes incarnate and truth is revealed. Dante’s obsessive linguistic self-​consciousness calls continually to mind modes in which language takes place and shapes human life and consciousness. His whole Paradiso makes this manifest. But there is one passage where Dante deliberately and explicitly treats this self-​reflexivity of language in conjunction with its theological ground. He understands this self-​reflexivity in overtly linguistic terms, and he expounds an express doctrine of self-​reflexivity as the source of all creation: Non per avere a sé di bene acquisto,   ch’esser non può, ma perché suo splendore   potesse, risplendendo, dir ‘Subsisto’, in sua etternità di tempo fore,   fuor d’ogni altro comprender, come i piacque,   s’aperse in nuovi amori l’etterno amore. Né prima quasi torpente si giacque;   ché né prima né poscia procedette   lo discorrer di Dio sovra quest’acque.

           (XXIX.13–​ 21)

(“Not in order to have for itself an acquired good,   which cannot be, but in order that its splendor   in shining back might say ‘I subsist,’ in its eternity outside of time, 4 Winfried Wehle, Dichtung über Dichtung. Dantes Vita Nuova: die Aufhebung des Minnesangs im Epos (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1986), especially 127–​50. 5  Piero Boitani, “Poesia e poetica della creazione,” Dante e il suo futuro (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 2013), especially 130–​46.

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Self-Referentiality as Creative Source  205   outside of all comprehension, as pleased Him,   the eternal Love opened itself in new loves. Nor did it lie as if torpid before that,   since neither before or after proceeded   the discoursing of God over these waters.”) Divine Creation is grasped by Dante as a discursive act of self-​reflection (“lo discorrer di Dio sovra quest’acque”). He thus presents a self-​reflexive grounding of the Absolute as a linguistic act of self-​grounding, an act of saying “I am,” “I subsist.” However, this act is also the creative source of all: the imagery of (dis)coursing over the waters recalls the spirit of God moving over the face of the waters in Genesis 1:2. Not, finally, an act of terminal self-​enclosure, self-​reflection is the original act of Creation that gives birth to the entire cosmos. Beatrice, in her capacity as theological revelation, explains that God could acquire nothing by creating, but that he wished for his reflected light, his splendor, to be able to say in its shining: “I subsist.” This act of self-​reflection occurs outside of time and outside of all understanding except God’s own. It has therefore no before or after. Nevertheless, it is an act that is described as speech—​as “discorrer.” The language act of Creation is the original template for all created speech acts, including the original speech act of human self-​consciousness, the primiloquium, which is the archetypal example Dante adduces of self-​ transcending self-​reflection in created being. Adam begins existing in joy (“inciperet a gaudio”), rejoicing in his own being and turning in praise to the divine Being who freely gave it to him (“qui gratis dotaverit”) and who is Himself nothing but total Joy (“ipse Deus totum sit gaudium,” De vulgari eloquentia I.iv.4; I.v.2). His first act of self-​consciousness turns Adam to his Source in transcendent Being, who can only be felt through Adam’s feeling his own joy in being.

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41  The Paradox of Lyric as Song of the Self—​Deflected to the Other

One of the main determinations of Dante’s approach to language and divinity in the Paradiso is that it is lyrical. What does it mean to approach language—​ not to mention divinity—​ lyrically? Lyrical experience, as described from early on in the modern lyric tradition, springs from the subject. It constructs itself by artifices of self-​reflection. It is bound up with a psychology of narcissism. Yet Dante finds capacities for transcendence in the lyric which escape the reduction to solipsistic vanity that persistently menaces the lyric mode. He discovers that precisely this path through the self can become an opening to the most absolute experience of the other—​even of the ultimate Other—​and therewith a channel to the vision of divinity. The lyrical use of language testifies eminently to what is beyond language, namely, the experience of the Unsayable—​in which all beings are held together in undifferentiated, unarticulated (dis) order. This aspiration is already evident in the lyric enterprise of Dante’s predecessors, the great lyric artists whom he studies, and imitates, and endeavors to surpass—​particularly the Troubadours and their Italian, especially Sicilian and Tuscan, imitators. However, the potential of lyric experience for becoming Paradise in a fully theological sense is made palpable in unprecedented ways by the lyricism of the Paradiso. A certain paradox about language as such becomes especially transparent in the case of lyrical language. It is by concentration on itself that lyric can best evoke what transcends it and is absolutely other than it, namely, God, in the Paradiso. Lyrical language concentrates particularly on its own audible and musical form in an effort to evoke the ineffable. The linguistic means is revealed as striving toward an end that it cannot express, but that is best intimated in and through this very inability. This paradox of speech about the unspeakable enacts a sort of dialectic in which negative poetics imitates negative theology. The Paradiso thus embodies a dialectical logic based on the “coincidentia oppositorum.” In De vulgari eloquentia I.xv.5, Dante alludes to a “commixtionem oppositorum”—​an echo of the coincidentia oppositorum that in the Middle Ages was sometimes associated with the thought of John Scott Eriugena. Later, in the Renaissance, Nicholas of Cusa promotes this doctrine to an overarching paradigm of negative-​theological

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The Paradox of Lyric as Song of the Self  207 thought. Such a (negative) dialectical logic is driven, at least potentially, by a movement of transumption or sublation. This becomes fully explicit in its later Hegelian avatar with the concept of drive (Trieb) as an immanent conatus that pushes the dialectic always beyond any achieved form toward its other or opposite.1 The hybrid physical and psychic notion of Trieb has received especially suggestive development in Freudian psychoanalytical theory with Lacan, Kristeva, Ricoeur, and others. This dynamic aspect of the poem’s intrinsic motivation manifests itself as an opening beyond itself of every perfectly self-​enclosed artifact. The problematic is pursued by thinkers, including Derrida and Agamben, under the rubric of “passion” as an excess inherent in thought.2 It is developed in terms of a phenomenology of the experience of the erotic by Jean-​Luc Marion.3 The very intensity and perfection of its self-​enclosure brings on the lyric poem’s dialectical inversion into openness toward the Other. This movement is, in fact, iconically embodied in the metrical form of Dante’s Comedy. A stanza of terza rima begins and ends with the same rhyme, but in its middle verse it bears another rhyme, and precisely this “other” constitutes the impulse driving forward to its continuation as taken up in the ensuing stanza. Thus, the self-​ containment or reflexiveness of rhyme here has also its own self-​transcendence built into it. The sameness achieved in any given tercet, with its rhyming first and third lines, requires yet another tercet in order to complete the rhyme of its other, indeed its central, verse.4 This always open-​ended threefold rhythm has wide-​ ranging anthropological ramifications and psychoanalytical resonances.5

1  Stephan Grotz, Negationen des Absoluten: Meister Eckhart, Cusanus, Hegel (Hamburg: Meiner, 2009) traces this crucial thread of tradition. 2  Jacques Derrida, Passion (Paris: Galilée, 1993). Jacopo D’Alonzo, “Linguaggio e passioni nella filosofia de Giorgio Agamben,” Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 7/​1 (2013): 18–​30. www.rifl.unical.it/​index.php/​rifl/​article/​view/​3. Accessed 1/​9/​2017. 3  Jean-​Luc Marion, Le phénomène érotique (Paris: Grasset, 2003). 4  John Freccero, “The Significance of Terza Rima,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 258–​74. See, further, section 50 below. 5 Dennis Patrick Slattery, “Dante’s Terza Rima in The Divine Comedy: The Road of Therapy,” International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 17 (2008): 80–​90.

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42  Self and Other between Order and Chance—​Ambiguity in Lyric Language

In its most typically modern forms, which generally take their distance from traditional choral and impersonal models, lyric turns confessional and becomes a song of the self. Yet its standing purpose is to transcend and transform the self into song. The self as lover is naturally suited to this purpose. The self has a capacity of self-​enclosure, of making itself self-​sufficient. This capacity is mirrored in the intricately constructed, often closed, artifactual forms of the lyric. But precisely this self-​definition opens to and evokes an otherness that exceeds the self. Thematically, lyric poetry in its origins revolves around the beloved, the lady, toward whom total loyalty and devotion, and even abject dependency, are avowed. Among the Troubadours, this is expressed by the metaphor of vasallage. The capacity of self-​enclosure is the enabling condition at once of sin or selfishness and of its redemption through the rehabilitation and perfection of form in the imitation of God. This ambiguity is acute in Christian epic poetry and riddles, notably, Milton’s Paradise Lost. In Book VIII, the Garden of Eden is structured by self-​enclosure and by mirroring self-​ reflections at the levels of its contents and of its language, especially with regard to Eve’s ironically sinuous (snakelike) self-​admirings. This self-​ reflectiveness insinuates a cutting-​off of humanity from God in sinful and illusory self-​sufficiency—​indeed, the Fall. And yet, by the epic’s end, in Book XII, after the Archangel Michael bestows on Adam a prophetic vision of the redemption of humanity by Christ, the fallenness of the human condition has become a “happy fall” (469–​78). Adam’s sin is eventually celebrated as a felix culpa, since it leads him by a way of (self-​) negation to discover God outside himself, outside the Garden of his own self-​absorption. This going out of himself, propelled by internal disharmony, is itself a way of mirroring the divine discord between Father and Son in Book III that expresses Milton’s Arian leanings (confirmed by his De Doctrina Christiana). Lyric in modern times has often taken upon itself to break out of its self-​enclosed form as language in love with itself. Lyric has sometimes turned into an attack of language against itself as a conventional form. George Steiner, in After Babel, dates this self-​negating turn of the lyric—​ its aiming at the destruction of language—​from 1871 and the rebellions of

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Self and Other between Order and Chance  209 Arthur Rimbaud. Modern lyric, eminently the language-​destroying, self-​ deconstructing verse of Paul Celan, follows along this line. We encounter here a turning point in the history of modern poetry provoked by a dialectic internal to poetic language. Lyric is driven toward articulating and fixing form—​but also toward overcoming it and opening to an experience beyond form: such lyric reaches out in the direction of the formless. Before arriving at such extremes of self-​annihilation, however, lyric normally embodies the core of the attempt to construct an order within the immanence of the self, a microcosm. It is song, harmony, music—​ if not in the usual sense, then at least in the sense of intellectual order defined by Saint Augustine in De ordo and by Boethius in De institutione musica.1 In a certain sense, the lyric’s task is to purge itself of chance, of all that is not dictated from within by its own internal order, like Dante’s Paradise in which no “contingency” (“casual punto,” XXXI.52–​60) can be found. This humanly impossible poetic task is pursued later still by Mallarmé in his “grand oeuvre,” which pivots precisely on the discovery and declaration of its own impossibility: “A throw of the dice will never abolish chance” (“Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard”). The construction of an order without contingency, an order which receives only from and into itself (“da sé in sé riceve”), is envisaged by Dante as an imitation of divine order (Purgatorio XXI.40–​72). But it can also come perilously close to supplanting such order. The New Criticism, with its idea of the poem as a well-​wrought urn, tended to treat the poem as a totally autonomous structure without connection to any world outside.2 The dangers of this autonomous activity of self-​building are legion and have been steadily subjected to the vigilant and discerning eye of higher authorities from the church to the psychoanalyst. They are a frequent theme also in literature, the most privileged place of production of such artifices of reflection, where they also expose false representations of the self. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, for example, insinuates the psychological pitfalls of lyric as crystallized in the “Petrarchan” sonnets built into Troilus’s discourse of love. These indulgently narcissistic compositions are symbolic of deviation from the true and are instrumental in upsetting social hierarchy and public morality—​and thus in bringing about the downfall of Troy.3 Yet the subversiveness of lyric, its troping of the proper values of words and thereby of everything else, as well as its self-​enclosure, while apparently irresponsible and insubordinate to any outside norm or objective

1  See, further, Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung,” ed. Anna Granville (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 34–​35. 2  Cleanth Brooks, The Well-​Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947). 3  See R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word, Part Two: “Troilus and Criseyde and the ‘Falsing’ of the Referent.”

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210  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits order, is not quite as pat as this story makes it out to be. Lyric can also be discovered as a way of opening to a higher order beyond the self, a way of creating harmony from below as a means of attunement to a universal harmony grasped in faith. Reflection, and especially self-​reflection, work this way in Dante. Self-​reflection engenders the self, but also orients it as aboriginally beholden to a transcendent Other. Dante’s Paradiso is arguably the consummate expression of this other-​directed self-​reflexivity: his achievement will be imitated and repeated obsessively, albeit only fragmentarily and often unwittingly, by poets ever after.4 A path of development building up to the Paradiso leads from the Troubdadours through the lyric traditions of the Italian peninsula in which Dante schooled himself. This genealogy underwrites the course of his reflection. Much critical attention has been paid to Dante’s subsumption of his poetic predecessors, his drive to negate and sublate them into the higher synthesis of his more comprehensive truth.5 At stake here is not only a particular and outstanding personality characteristic of Dante, but also the literary logic of lyrical language itself as revealed in Dante’s work. The autotelic character of the poem is discovered with jubilation by Dante—​but as a fecund resource carrying him beyond himself without limits. Self-​reflection, as the enabling structure of this projection of oneself into an Other, entails momentously a logic of “repetition” as this notion has emerged in modern thought, especially in its development from Kierkegaard to Heidegger. Dante’s intensification of self-​reflection anticipates this logic and is, in turn, elucidated by it.

4  Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante traces some exquisite instances. 5 One such axis of criticism runs from Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) to Tristan Kay, Dante’s Lyric Redemption: Eros, Salvation, Vernacular Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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43  Language beyond Representation—​ Repetition and Performativity

As a reflecting of self back into itself, self-​reflection is a form of repetition. We have already seen that all the traditional distinguishing features of lyric—​ rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance—​ can quite generally be comprehended as figures of repetition. Also based on repetition are anaphora and etymological figures, where certain radicals are repeated in cognate words, puns, or other sorts of wordplay, particularly in poetry and lyrical prose. At further discursive levels, topoi and tropes are sorts of repetition with a difference or with variation on a theme. These formal modes of repetition open up various contrasting possibilities for concrete, historical instantiation. Olivier Boulnois’s archeology of the visual in the Middle Ages is based on the distinction between, on the one hand, the representative use of the image to refer to an original that it resembles or otherwise evokes and, on the other hand, the image as a double that does not represent something else so much as repeat its features in an autonomous instance. The latter has a force all its own rather than being derivative from and dependent on an original to which it refers. An absolute, perfect image (like Christ as “the image of the invisible God,” Colossians 1:15) becomes rather a sort of double or repetition, not just a copy whose essential being consists in referring to its original source. Such an image is what it refers to and yet  also lets the latter be another, further instantiation. Of course, an image can also block or deflect access to what it represents. This bifurcation in the ontological valence of images opens up an ambiguity: “The image … hesitates between veracity and vanity. In viewing the world through an image, man accedes to truth; in losing the world through the image, he errs in vanity” (“l’image … hésite entre vérité et vanité. En visant le monde par l’image, l’homme accède à la vérité”).1 The thinking involved in the true use of images is not representation of an object so much as a form of repetition of the real. In this medieval tradition of thought about representation and expression in the image,

1  Olivier Boulnois, Au-​delà de l’image: Une archéologie du visuel au Moyen Âge (Ve-​XVIe siècle) (Paris: Seuil, 2008), 11.

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212  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits according to Boulnois, the image is “expressive” of the causal principle that produces it (“le propre de l’image réside dans son caractère expressif, c’est-​à-​dire sa dépendance envers un principe productif,” 28). There is an organic genetic relation flowing from the cause to its expression. Being an expression of one’s cause is still the fundamental principle of Spinoza’s philosophy, as Deleuze’s reading of him effectively demonstrates.2 Yet this real connection is all but completely effaced by modern representation, which is an arbitrary production by a subject of an “appearance” (see section 28). Through an image, one can relate to the reality of which it is the image. This relation can even be given as a direct expression rather than only being forged via representation. In a Christian spiritual key, this is what Orthodox icons do. Dante in the Paradiso likewise brings about by “repetition” through poetic language a direct connection of the soul with an invisible, inconceivable God. In practically proto-​Protestant fashion before any sectarian separation, his words do not just strive to represent the invisible, unrepresentable God but rather facilitate an aniconic experience opening the soul to direct receptivity and communion with the divine. They can connect the soul im-​mediately with its Cause in God. The word-​magic of modern poets enshrined, for example, in Rimbaud’s “Alchemie du verbe” derives still from the type of poetic theurgy that one can descry being invented in the Paradiso. By his “verbal alchemy” in Une saison en enfer, Rimbaud releases the source of what Dante recognizes as a divine energy within. The verbal magic in question works essentially by reflection and, more specifically, self-​reflection. Rimbaud’s language loses objective, realistic reference, most patently in the lyrically condensed compositions of Les Illuminations (a title evoking traditions of mystic awakening) in order to create inner-​linguistic, or language immanent, referentiality that opens an infinite world of its own self-​ engendering.3 In light of Dante’s Paradiso, these revolutionary modern poetics show up as repeating transfigurations of the real by the alchemy of words in medieval poetics. Alchemy was a powerful and ambiguous discourse in the Middle Ages, and it has a conspicuous place in Dante’s poetics.4 Dante deploys an alchemical verbal magic of repetition already in his rime petrose or “stony rhymes” and all through the Commedia, mixing language’s own internal resources in savant combinations apt to conjure a new reality.

2  Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression. Following up on this theme is Simon Duffy, Quality, Quantity and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2016). 3  Roger Little, Rimbaud’s Illuminations (Valencia: Grant & Cutler, 1983). 4  Theodor Ziolkowski, The Alchemist in Literature: From Dante to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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Language beyond Representation  213

From Reference to Repetition—​The Production of Presence Language achieves this state of poetic self-​transcendence primarily by lyric figures of repetition, whereby determinate reference to an external object is transcended. Lyric is the epitome of language and shows that language’s more fundamental, comprehensive, and far-​reaching function is not to refer but to repeat. Indeed, reference itself is intelligible only within a movement of repetition—​or return to the same through a token restituting something that is thereby raised to a higher ontological level. As such, linguistic “reference” no longer denotes a mere object, but rather a mediated form of presence that unites subjective and objective aspects. In Dante’s reconstruction of it, Adam’s first word, his inaugural naming of God—​his primiloquium—​is not so much an act of reference to God as a response to God that “repeats” the act of creation in joy by a reaffirmation of its source, the Creator. It bears repeating that Adam’s first connection with God is his feeling his own joy (gaudium) in existing. On these grounds, Dante understands the first humanly spoken word to be the Name of God: “and since no joy is external to God but wholly within God and God himself is totally joy, it follows that the first speaker said ‘God’ before all else” (“et cum nullum gaudium sit extra Deum, sed totum in Deo, et ipse Deus totus sit gaudium, consequens est quod primus loquens primo et ante omnia dixisset ‘Deus,’ ” De vulgari eloquentia, I.iv.4). Adam is not cogitating on joy and representing God as joy. He is rather naming God by responding immediately in joy to the gift of his own being, and this is God, esse, or at least the human enactment or repetition of God—​thus God insofar as God can be humanly experienced. This type of “repetition” constitutes a transcendence of the prison house of language and a rupture of the system of symbolic representation.5 Language’s self-​transcendence, accordingly, as Dante discloses it lyrically in the Paradiso, needs to be understood in terms of repetition rather than of representation. Representation does not do justice to the dynamism of language’s relation to the world and to its Source. This relation consists in making the world over again in language’s own image, repeating the act of self-​reflection every time language is deployed. In this respect, lyric is the epitome of language, for it makes clearly manifest that the primary function of language as poiesis is not to refer or to represent, but to repeat—​to (re)actualize presence in thought and speech. Representation presupposes that some sort of neutral, uninvolved, objectifying relation of correspondence is possible between entities otherwise not intrinsically connected. But such a relation is always only an artifice and a fiction. It requires the intentional act of a subject that 5  This act of repetition is considered through the lens of the Derridian “supplement” by Glen Arbery, “Adam’s First Word and the Failure of Language in Paradiso XXXIII,” in Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature, ed. Julian N. Wasserman e Lois Roney (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 31–​44.

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214  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits reproduces an object as present. Representation (together with reference) is thus best understood as itself grounded in the more primordial function of repetition. So considered, representation itself is a way of making present something that is absent, however attenuated this presencing becomes. Even the word “re-​presentation” says as much. The past, in such artful repetition, is not over but is presently being lived anew. The past is opened up thereby to the genuinely and radically new. Such repetition is the site of a self-​transcendence of the past as deposited in linguistic constructs in order that the past may be received again from the future as an open possibility in the present. Lyric does not, in its essence, representationally objectify what it imitates but, instead, directly repeats the real, assimilating feeling or mood, the animations received from … it cannot say exactly where. In this way, lyric is capable of being informed and energized by a reality beyond the reach of representation. Such lyricism makes possible the real presence of the transcendent in concrete elements of form, in material signifiers. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht explores how materialities of communication exceed the hermeneutic grasp of meaning. He emphasizes “the presence effects of rhyme and alliteration” that could never be repressed by all the power of hermeneutics.6 Such unfathomable presence underlies radical medieval insights into the Incarnation in its verbal expressions as defying rational hermeneusis, for example, by Alanus de Insulis (see section 7) or by Boethius for whom “The name of Christ is equivocal and cannot be comprehended by any definition” (“aequivocum nomen est Christi et nulla potest definitione conclude”).7

From Modern Philosophies of Repetition to Lyric as Non-​Identical Repetition Repetition de-​objectifies our relation to the world and to the past. The past is no longer something I  remember as an object of my memory. When I repeat a past event, I am within the horizon of the event rather than its being within mine. I am actually living it: the event is happening in and shaping my life at present. I cannot apprehend my present except through the past that it repeats. The connection with the past that is repeated is not that of a static representation. It consists, instead, in the past’s being always already operative as a legacy of residues that determine my present horizon for living. Conversely, my present also impinges on this past, on its meaning and all that it can yield for the future. In this sense, we are always “repeating.” The philosophical force of this term 6  Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 7 Boethius, Contra Eutychen, in Theological Tractates, ed. H. F. Stewart (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 96. Alain de Libera, La philosophie médiévale (Paris: PUF, 1989), 70–​71 pursues this topic.

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Language beyond Representation  215 is in its connoting the present actuality of the past—​rather than just its passive, static recollection. In some religious traditions, “recollection” is a meditative activity of gathering and “collecting together,” as opposed to merely remembering. Ignatian exercises, for example, entail a powerful actualizing in present imagination of past events. To repeat something is to realize it in one’s own existence rather than only ideally or intellectually in a representation referring to something absent or past instead of real and actual. A crucial aspect of the sort of relation between language and the world that we are calling “repetition” has been highlighted as “performative” by J. L. Austin.8 Philosophers in the wake of Austin demonstrated that fact-​stating or representing statements can never be rigorously separated and isolated from performative utterances. Performativity turns out to be a dimension of all language, including constative language. A cognate insight drives also philosophers developing the use-​theory of meaning following Ludwig Wittgenstein and his refutation of his own earlier picture-​theory of language in the Tractatus (4.01–​4.032). Language meaningfully relates to the world not by representing something detachedly as an object. Instead, language’s meaning is determined pragmatically by how it is used and by its own implication in what it says. What language means has to be interpreted from what it does and thus from an act transpiring within the context of a practice or way of life. Consequently, representation is rooted in something extra-​linguistic that is not present as an object placed in evidence but, instead, obscurely determines meaning. This extra-​linguistic “something” (or nothing) has priority as the rule and reason for representation, which can only “repeat” or enact it. Self-​reflection operating in the form of repetition springs open closed systems of representation. Specifically, Kierkegaard’s theory of repetition counters Hegel by pursuing the traces of the transcendent in the spheres of the religious, the ethical, and the aesthetic. Kierkegaard effects an apophatic turn that opens representation toward something infinite and fathomless that cannot be objectively represented, but can only be repeated in existence by a subject. Kierkegaard works out his Trinitarian understanding of self-​ reflexivity through infinite “reduplication” (Fordoblelse) in line with his doctrine of “repetition” (Gjentagelse).9 Such self-​reflection is not mere repetition of the same, but can rather effect reflection through to the source and the ground of all. The latter, however, is not objectively representable. Instead, non-​identical repetition places the reflected element or self into relation with everything else by imagining a ground that would be common to all. Theology (in its

8 J. L.  Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 9 Peter Kline, Passion for Nothing: Kierkegaard’s Apophatic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017) offers a kindred interpretation.

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216  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits medieval synthesis) harbors such reflection as inhabiting the nature of being itself (section 30). The seminal modern texts standing as landmarks on this terrain of a revolutionary philosophical rethinking of non-​ identical repetition (“Wiederholung”) include Søren Kierkegaard’s Repetition: A Venture in Experimental Psychology (1843), pseudonymously attributed to Constantin Constantius, and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), especially Part II, Chapter  5, on “Zeitlichkeit und Geschichtlichkeit” (temporality and historicity). Gilles Deleuze also pursues such reflection, working especially from the Nietzschean teaching on the Eternal Return of the Same.10 Heidegger and Deleuze both show how returning is itself the only constant. The Same (which is not the identical) is constructed via the re-​turn—​a turning again in a self-​reflexive movement. This performance of reflection is what gives us being and time alike in the Heideggerian theory of repetition as Wieder-​holung (literally “taking up again”).11 This eternal return is the recurring of the unique, since everything, every being, is unique. Following the suggestions especially of Kierkegaard, Catherine Pickstock’s theologically motivated thinking of the role of repetition in ontology likewise aims to safeguard the unique being of things and yet, at the same time, evinces a crucial nuance of difference from post-​ structuralist appropriations of such thinking.12 She emphasizes a link between things, an obscure analogical unity that must remain ineffable because it is mediated by a subject and can only be poetically performed. The subject can repeat through imaginative performance—​but cannot objectively represent—​this connection with a transcendent reality. We already encountered this subjective, personal, “existential” repetition of the absolute as theorized by the Islamic thinkers that background Dante’s reenactment of a philosophia perennis (section 36). Applications of such repetition radiate throughout the domains of culture and symbolic representation. The poetic-​symbolic and the sacred unite in such realizations through repetition of an event of the transcendent in the immanence of actual experience. Catholic theologian Louis-​Marie Chauvet perceives this sacramental outlook on liturgy and life as “homologous in attitude” with Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics through an ontology of repetition.13 An unrepresentable “source” or “ground” 10  Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). 11  Claus Caesar, Poetik der Wiederholung: ethische Dichtung und ökonomisches “Spiel” in Hermann Brochs Romanen “Der Tod Vergils” und “Die Schuldlosen” (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001) offers detailed application of Heidegger’s theories to (modern) literary texts. 12  Catherine Pickstock, Repetition and Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 13 Chauvet, Symbole et sacrement: Une relecture sacramentelle de l’existence chrétienne (Paris: Cerf 1987). In English and focusing this issue, see Glenn Ambrose, The Theology of Louis-​Marie Chauvet: Overcoming Onto-​Theology with the Sacramental Tradition (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012).

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Language beyond Representation  217 (all expressions are inadequate as representations) can be accessed only through repetition. Similarly, scholars have effectively highlighted the paramount role of repetition in realizing the experience of the sacred, for example, in early modern literature.14 Lyric typically transpires in a temporality of repetition. It originates for modern times with the Troubadours as the “circularity of song,” where singing comes to be fundamentally about itself. This singing creates a structure of repetition between what it is and what it is about or what it says: its act, the taking place of language, is repeated in its thematic content and vice versa. As self-​reflexive, the lyric is about its own creative act and ultimately about the act of Creation itself. In pure lyric, the poem becomes identified with a repeatable Saying itself. Repetition concerns the way that language, or any event, takes place existentially rather than just the representational content that it conveys. From the beginning of the Inferno, Dante inscribes his poem expressly into a time repeating the Creation. “The time was the beginning of the morning, /​and the sun was mounting with the stars that accompanied him, /​when first the divine Love moved those lovely things” (“Temp’era dal principio del mattino, /​e il sol montava in sù con quelle stelle che eran con lui, /​quando l’amor divino mosse di prima quelle cose belle,” I.37–​ 42). In fact, lyric circularity posits the contemporaneity of all moments. In so doing, it strives to transcend time as an implacable factor of difference and to absorb difference back into itself by self-​reflection. This makes difference only a moment within lyric circularity. Paradoxically, poetry must abandon itself completely to time so as to have no exteriority to time. And this is exactly what the poetry of the Divine Comedy does by delivering itself to the impermanence of the vernacular. This self-​ abandon of language to time transfigures it into a vanishing image of what transcends any given representation and becomes, instead, eternally (re)present(able). This dialectic of time and eternity in lyric is expounded in section 58.

14  For instance, Regina Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), followed up by her Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

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44  Quest for the Origin of Language—​From De vulgari eloquentia to the Paradiso

Repetition has emerged here as an eminent way of reactualizing origins. What linguistic self-​reflection most essentially aims to reflect is the source or origin of language. This is indeed a paramount concern for Dante early and late. In his treatise on the vulgar tongue, Dante approaches the origin of language “historically” by speculating on the original language of Adam. At this stage, he accepts the Patristic view that it was a God-​given form of language (“certam formam locutionis a Deo cum anima primam concreatam fuisse,” I.vi.4) identical with Hebrew. But the theme is taken up again in Paradiso XXVI, where Adam attributes to human beings a natural capacity to fashion language as they fancy (“natura lascia /​poi fare a voi secondo che v’abbella,” 131–​32). In this later version, Adam spoke a language that disappeared in the course of evolution, since all things that are humanly produced are transient and perishable. In its fallen state, language is capable of mirroring divinity only poetically—​ thanks to its self-​reflexivity. Accordingly, Dante treats language not only as a mythical theme in his representations of its origins. Even more momentously, a certain quest for the origin of language as built into Dante’s overall project is made manifest specifically in his meticulous practice of writing. Refracting the origin of language turns out, for him, to belong to the most essential purposes of poetry. The art of poetic representation, as practiced in the radically searching and experimental mode of Dante’s Paradiso, enfolds a constant effort to discover and disclose the sources of representation. These sources of language are also the founts or springs of being itself. Theologically, of course, the source of both language and being is “God”: being comes from the Creator, and language reflects the divine Word. But how can poetry become transparent to its divine source—​ both as language and as being or event? The two are inseparable, since poetry’s being is language. The answer given by Dante and by a discernible tradition of poetic thinking that can be organized around him is: self-​reflection. For in its self-​reflexivity, what language reflects is not only itself but also its Source, its transcendent ground in Trinitarian self-​reflexivity. Yet this source is equally a “nothing,” since it cannot

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Quest for the Origin of Language  219 be apprehended as any thing. Its divine simplicity and wholeness utterly defy expression and are betrayed by any articulation. Only Dante’s constant declarations of ineffability are able to signal this inaccessible Fount or Ground. This sort of philosophical reflection on language as self-​reflexivity opens to a transcendence that is also an abyss to our understanding. Such reflection is at work preeminently in Dante’s poem and, specifically, in its undertaking to find or recreate language in something akin to its original state. In De vulgari eloquentia, Book I, Dante hunts after the vulgare illustre as an Ur-​language at the origins of language. He stalks it under the elusive figure of the panther that is present, leaving its scent, in all languages and yet is distinctly identifiable in none (“pantheram … redolentem ubique et necubi apparentem,” I.xvi.1). In Book II, rather than surveying historical languages and contemporary dialects, Dante shifts to considering the illustrious vernacular as literary language used by the “doctores illustres” writing poetry in the various regions of Italy. Continuous with this approach, the Paradiso experiments with a poetic discourse that recreates language anew so as to disclose its hidden origins—​or rather the hiddenness of its origins. The present reading of the Paradiso attempts to follow Dante’s theological presentation of self-​reflexivity as disclosing the origin of language. This turns out to be a disclosure of an ineffable mystery hidden in the bosom of God—​ occulted in the self-​ reflexive relations of the Trinity within itself. These otherwise unrepresentable relations are already coded into Dante’s declaration of his theological-​lyrical poetics given in answer to Bonagiunta in Purgatory, with its threefold (Trinitarian) trace of one Source of poetic dictation that is inspired by Love or animated by Spirit that then disseminates itself in an ongoing production of signification: E io a lui: “I’ mi son un che, quando   Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo   ch’è ditta dentro vo significando.”

      (Purgatorio XXIV.52–​54)

And I to him: “I am one who, when   Love inspires me, take note, and in that manner   which is dictated within I go signifying.” As origin of language, however, the Trinitarian divinity must be apprehended most profoundly as nothing that language can articulate. In essence, lyric language is a revelation of nullity—​so far as any stateable or comprehensible being is concerned. Lyric language in particular can wholly abstract from content outside language and song. Lyric discloses the origin of language in what has no articulable content. We have already seen this demonstrated for lyric language from its origins in modern literature with the Troubadours. It is precisely this adventure

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220  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits of language in the lyric that is brought to a spectacular culmination and theological apotheosis in Dante’s Paradiso, where this “no-​thing” of lyric experience is expounded as the God who is revealed in the Bible and refracted through the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

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45  Dante’s Recovery of Speculative Metaphysics as Productive

In the Paradiso, self-​reflectiveness, for all its linguistic self-​consciousness, is not just empty, formal repetition: it is ontologically productive. Even thematically and narratively, speculation has an active, effective role as a “making” (poiesis). At the literal level, speculation is the means by which Dante is propelled upward through the heavens. Through gazing into Beatrice’s eyes, reflecting her reflective gaze, he achieves progressively sublimer states of being that elevate him, each time, to the next higher sphere of the heavens. Immediately after the proem and a description of the setting at the outset of the Paradiso, Dante’s ascent to the first heaven begins with his imitating Beatrice’s contemplative gaze in an act described through the imagery of reflection drawn from the science of optics. The metaphor of the ray reflected back toward its origin is itself glossed in turn by the image of a pilgrim’s longing for return home: E sì come secondo raggio sole   uscir del primo e risalire in suso,   pur come pellegrin che tornar vuole, così de l’atto suo, per li occhi infusi   ne l’imagine mia, il mio si fece,   e fissi li occhi al sole oltre nostr’uso.

           (I.49–​ 54)

(And as a second ray is wont   to issue from the first and climb back up,   like a pilgrim desirous of return, So her act, through eyes infused   into my imagination, was made my own,   and I fixed my eyes on the sun beyond our usual capacity.) Speculation is productive and transformative. Dante’s gazing into Beatrice’s gaze—​ his mirroring her own regard (“Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei”)—​metamorphoses him, causing him to transcend human

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222  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits nature (“trasumanar”) and become divine like the fabled Ovidian fisherman Glaucus (I.67–​70). Dante’s speculative regard immediately results in a specular doubling of the phenomena of heaven itself in what suggests a leap from the sensible to an intelligible order. Dante’s Christian-​Aristotelian heaven is equivocally both intellectual and sensible: e di subito parve giorno a giorno   essere aggiunto, come quei che puote   avesse il ciel d’un altro sol addorno.

(I.58–​63)

(and immediately day to day appeared   to be added, as if he who can   had adorned the heaven with another sun.) Indeed speculation consists in a reprise and a giving back of what is given, namely, sensation, but without the same limitations of time and place. In reflection, all is transfigured by being repeatable and universalizable. Being is rather pluralized by being repeated as an image. Being, in its intrinsic infinity and freedom, is infinitely speculative and can produce images of being without limit. Such reduplication can be seen happening again, for example, in the heaven of the sun, where a second crown of sapient spirits accrues to and doubles the first: “and motion to motion and song to song was gathered” (“e moto a moto e canto a canto colse,” XII.5–​6). The whole universe is a speculation of God, in two senses—​not only according to the medieval theory of the essences of things as His ideas, but also in the sense of mirroring and resembling Him through its orderliness. As explained in the course of Dante’s specularly propelled ascent narrated in the first canto of the Paradiso, the universal order of things is itself a resemblance to God:     “Le cose tutte quante hanno ordine tra loro, e questo è forma che l’universo a Dio fa simigliante.”

     (I.103–​ 5)

    (“All things together have an order among themselves, and this is form that makes the universe similar to God.”) This very order of things turns out to make up their essential being and plenitude, which is God.

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46  Referentially Empty Signs and Semiotic Plenitude

The notion of lyric self-​reflexivity even more radically transforms the concept of the sign. Not just empty of extra-​linguistic content, the lyric sign is a form of plenitude and a fecund reality in itself. The sign in Paradise becomes an “idea that gives birth by loving” (“idea /​che partorisce amando”). This phrase occurs in the context of a declaration of the self-​ reflexive nature of the Creation, mortal and immortal, made in the mirror image of its Creator: Ciò che non more e ciò che può morire   non è se non splendor di quella idea   che partorisce, amando, il nostro Sire; ché quella viva luce che sì mea   dal suo lucente, che non si disuna   da lui né da l’amor ch’a lor s’intrea, per sua bontate il suo raggiare aduna,   quasi specchiato, in nove sussistenze,   etternalmente rimanendosi una.

       (XIII.52–​ 60)

(That which never dies and that which can die   is nothing but the resplendence of that idea   to which, by loving, our Sire gives birth; for that live light that so derives   from its emitting source, that does not separate   from it nor from the love that in them inthrees itself, through its goodness gathers in one its radiance,   as if mirrored, in nine substances,   eternally remaining one itself. This passage is one of many anticipations of the imagery of divine self-​ reflection that culminates in the final canto of the poem. It is in crucial respects a reprise of the Trinitarian self-​reflexive logic of love driving the inner dynamic of divinity in its intrinsic self-​relatedness outward toward

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224  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits its creative act. The Trinitarian self-​love that spills over into Creation (“Looking at his Son with Love,” etc., X.  1–​6) was examined already in Part I, section 4. The Trinity serves as model for how signs, through their formal self-​relatedness, can engender by internal self-​relation their own meaning and fulfillment. The bird images that flutter across and stud the heaven of Jupiter can be seen to work in this manner as vivid and winged emblems of signs (section 8). The sensorial plenitude of the sign is a theme developed especially in that (sixth) heaven replete with semiotic wonders. Likewise, in Canto VI, self-​reflective dynamics of form become incarnate in richly imaged narrative that sublates Roman history into the vicissitudes of the “sacred sign” (“sacrosanto segno”) of the imperial eagle. As with the Holy Trinity, self-​reflection issues here in historical incarnation.

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47  Sum—​Lyric as Self-​Manifestation of Language and its Ontological Power of Creation

Especially lyric calls language back to its self-​manifestational function, which is more basic than its representational and discursive functions. The latter are rather functions of presence produced through self-​reflection. Originarily, language is the immediate self-​disclosure of being.1 Indeed, the lyric in its self-​enclosure does not relate to its world primarily by means of codified referring so much as by means of iconic imitation, graphic and phonetic incarnation, and other ritual forms of “repetition” in which language fundamentally performs its meaning rather than just representing it.2 Already in its prosodic rhythms, lyric offers a reenactment and embodiment of being that is more immediate and concrete than any representational content or referencing of an object.3 Lyric language often connects unconsciously with exemplars from the past and with timeless archetypes.4 Language thus relates indirectly to a world outside itself, which it models and enables to become actual in linguistically determinate modes of being. In this sense, therefore, it is possible to see referentiality as only a limited version—​the visible cap, so to speak, or surface—​of language’s innate orientation to self-​transcendence through reflexivity performed in the image of a Trinitarian God. The exaltation of reference to the status of an absolute—​and the consequent denaturing of language to the status of a tool or transparent medium—​ is tantamount to imprisoning the power of language, as if this power depended merely on language’s referencing a world of external objects. Instead, we have seen that language 1 Heidegger’s On the Way to Language powerfully expounds the discourse of language as the self-​disclosure of Being, and Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Part III, extends this vein of speculation by developing a “linguistic ontology.” This thinking is examined later in sections 55–​56. 2 Heinz Schlaffer, Geistersprache: Zweck und Mittel der Lyrik (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2012), analyzes these extra-​representational functions of lyric language in their historical emergence from cult and ritual. 3 Henri Meschonnic, Critique du rythme: Anthropologie historique du langage (Paris: Verdier, 1982). 4 Carl Gustav Jung, “Psychologie und Dichtung” (1950), in Gesammelte Werke 15 (Düsseldorf: Patmos-​Walter Verlag, 1979), 3rd ed., 97–​120.

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226  Reflection and Breaking of its Circuits derives its referential power from its repetition of a transcendent Source and Origin through its own inherent dynamic of self-​reflection. Having seen this dynamic at work in Dante’s Paradiso as an inaugural exploration and invention of the possibilities of self-​reflection for generating sense in and through language, we turn in Part IV to working out these essential insights in the history of Western thinking subsequent to, but in continuity with, Dante.

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PART IV

Self-​Reflection, Speculation, and Revelation Modern Philosophy and the Linguistic Way to Wisdom in Western Tradition

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48  Lacanian Psychoanalytics of Self-​love: From the In-​fantile to the Divine

Lyric repeats and realizes language in its origin and plenitude yet, at the same time, enacts also the exile of language from objectivized reality. The lyrical may situate itself within the symbolic order of language by employing signs as language-​immanent symbols for extra-​ linguistic objects. Still, it tends to subvert the symbolic severance of word from object and to regress back to what Jacques Lacan calls the imaginary stage and even to evoke what he theorizes as the real, le réel—​reverting to a stage before all structuring by signs.1 These pre-​symbolic levels of consciousness are manifest especially in the destructuring of signs that is conceptualized by Julia Kristeva as “the semiotic” (“le sémiotique”).2 Dante features these regressive psycho-​linguistic tendencies, dramatizing them in certain passages of the Paradiso. His own poetical language, at its lyrical height, regresses to an infantile stage of being one with the maternal breast in unruptured wholeness before speech—​before division into subject and object: Ormai sarà più corta mia favella,   pur a quel ch’io ricordo, che d’un fante   che bagni ancor la lingua a la mammella.

         (XXXIII.106–​ 8)

(By now my tale will be more brief,   even with respect to what I recall, than that of a babe   that bathes its tongue still at the breast.) Curiously, Dante’s word fante here evokes the nursing infant literally as “speaking.” He compares his own condition of “speaking” via 1 Jacques Lacan, Encore, Le séminaire XX, ed. Jacques-​ Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975) explores this regression in religious language and mystic jouissance. 2 Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), Chapter  1: “Sémiotique et symbolique,” 17–​100.

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230  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation expression of linguistic impotence in face of the ineffable with that of an infant whose tongue is “bathing” at its mother’s breast. The image (like that of the mother bird in Paradiso XXIII) is one of regression from symbolic activity (speech) to tactile contact and nourishment. Such expressions evince a consistent pressure of infantile impulses to break through the surface of language’s formal symbolism. An urge of this sort might be heard in the Tuscan form “mamme” (“mommies”) used to cry out for the mother or even for the wetnurse, the “ama.” These same subsemantic syllables are audible in low-​vernacular speech as “Amme!” in the “Amen!” of souls expressing their longing for their bodies: Tanto mi parver sùbiti e accorti   e l’uno e l’altro coro a dicer “Amme!”,   che ben mostrar disio d’i corpi morti: forse non pur per lor, ma per le mamme,   per li padri e per li altri che fuor cari   anzi che fosser sempiterne fiamme.

    (Paradiso XIV.61–​66)

(They appeared to me so suddenly and so keen,   both the one and the other chorus, to say “Amen!”   that their desire for their dead bodies was manifest: perhaps not only for their own but also for their mommies,   for their fathers and for others who were dear   before they became sempeternal flames.) The intellectual significance of the sign is preempted by a corporeal crying out in chorus with voices that immediately manifest a visceral yearning. Dante suggests in Paradiso XXXIII that his final vision can be expressed only as the “speech” of the speechless “fante.” The “fante” or “fantolin” (XXIII.121) is actually a speechless infant: yet only the negation of “speaking” (fans) enables this condition to be perceived and signified. In Purgatorio XXV.61–​75, Statius describes how the human fetus develops from being an animal to being a human or a speaking soul (“Ma come d’animal divegna fante”) by being endowed with speech directly by God.3 Dante understands infant speechlessness from the speaking that is negated in the very word “in-​fant.” Dante uses the word infanti in Inferno IV.30 and infantes in De vulgari I.i.2, but in Paradiso XXXIII.107 the older form fante recalls the aphasia of the infant as itself

3  Vittorio Montemaggi, “In Unknowabilty as Love: The Theology of Dante’s Commedia,” in Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry, 68–​69, contextualizes Dante’s designation of speech as the threshold of humanity.

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Lacanian Psychoanalytics of Self-Love  231 a kind of minimalist or disappearing speech.4 The immediate identity of the infant with itself remains at some level intact even across and through the dislocations of the discursive construction of subjectivity that breaks and distances the subsequent relation of the self to the m/​other.5 The immediacy of the infant’s relation with this Other is still the basis of the productive and fertile self-​relation that Dante’s lyrical-​paradisiacal poetry exploits metaphorically. Narcissism can be connected psychoanalytically with a regression to the oral stage, where the infant becomes what it puts into its mouth. This immediate identity with the object is prior to symbolic rupture through the sign (which divides signifier from signified). The primary narcissism of a monadic universe is palpably embodied in the phonetic pattern of a line like: “Del bell’Ovile Ov’iO dOrmi agnellO” (“the lovely sheepfold where I  slept a lamb,” XXV.5). Such a line can be heard as expressing pre-​symbolic unity with the real, or as mouthing a kind of transcendent Oneness. In voicing this verse, the speaker can close out the hostility of the outside world in order to exist rather in the lyrical embrace and fetal self-​enclosure of the infantile O—​lulled by liquid l’s. This Oral state offers a psycho-​physiological matrix for the sublimated forms of the liturgical and rhetorical “O,” which is used already to great effect in Dante’s poem, for instance, in: “O elect company called to the great supper /​of the blessed lamb …” (“O sodalizio eletto alla gran cena /​Del benedetto agnello …,” XXIV.1ff). These verses, in addition to featuring nourishment through their intellectual and spiritual content figuring a collective meal, become food for the ear in a material-​auditory mode. Behind these paradisiacal images of infancy lurk imponderable ethical, psychological, and theological questions about the nature of self-​ love. Thomas Aquinas gives a rational justification for self-​love, which originates in infancy. For him, any love of the good is logically connected with its being “mine,” with its being proper to me. I participate in Being, which I love first and foremost as my own being: self-​love is thus an enabling condition for me to experience Being as good.6 Convivio IV.xxii.8 similarly affirms that all love stems from self-​love as the basis for loving others (“amando sé principalmente, e per sé l’altre cose”). Only by way of my own proper being am I able to recognize being in general as 4 Leo Spitzer, “Muttersprache und Muttererziehung,” Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: Vanni, 1945), 15–​65 suggests how the infant’s non-​verbal expression might be considered a sort of “native” speaking. 5 Gary Cestaro’s Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body brilliantly elaborates Lacanian and Kristevan perspectives in conjunction with a close reading of Dante’s texts wherever they touch on the themes of infancy and nurturing. 6  David M. Gallaghar, “Thomas Aquinas on Self-​Love as the Basis for Love of Others,” Acta Philosophica 8/​1 (1999): 23–​44. Anthony T. Flood, “Aquinas on Self-​Love and Love of God: The Foundations of Subjectivity and its Perfection,” International Philosophical Quarterly 56/​1 (2016): 45–​55.

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232  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation essentially desirable. Yet this necessary self-​love at the root and origin of all love is anything but reducible to sterile egotism because what is most proper to one transcends one as cause of one’s being and truth. I am not the measure of all things, and they cannot be reduced to their utility for me, even though I know their goodness firsthand only to the extent that I know a goodness which is properly my own. To know what is genuinely most proper to oneself is to love one’s source and to do so in common with one’s fellows. Saint Bernard (1090–​1153), well before Thomas, shows self-​love to be ineradicable in our nature and shows it to be the basis of a transcendent love. Even God himself loves us for himself. Self-​love is presented by Bernard as a kind of affective cogito: “I is affection” (ego affectus est) expresses a principle of self-​ reflection more basic than the cogito of thought. I is because I love.7 Through affect, this first-​person love is naturally transcended into a third-​person love, and it is inevitably rooted in the flesh. Precisely this rootedness in the flesh marks and undergirds an inherent egoism of love. But it is not a vicious egoism. Redemption itself, in Bernard’s teaching, is effected through affective attachment to the flesh of Christ. Divine or agapeic love itself works through a sensuous force or passion. The contradictions between self-​love and other-​directed love, however, prove more intransigent and disturbing in the view of Franciscan spiritualities, as is emphasized by Ernesto Buonaiuti.8 Buonaiuti brings to focus Dante’s reception of apocalyptic Franciscanism in the wake of Gioacchino da Fiore.9 For the Franciscans, self-​love and love of other were opposed and even incompatible. A kind of reconciliation might be found, nevertheless, in divine folly.10 Folly marks divine wisdom as in excess of all rational calculation, and love in its madness contravenes all originally self-​interested motives, sublating them into holiness. An inherent and ineradicable narcissism may be the driving force even in the love that the human being directs toward God. For Kristeva’s Bernard, love is the idealization of our narcissism through identification with God (Histoires d’amour, 214). Yet this is not a calm, rational love such as is conceived by Aquinas or Spinoza, for whom love of self and love of God are fully aligned. This “narcissistic” love is lived, instead, in a “tearing away from oneself for the benefit of the ideal identification with the beloved” (“arrachement à soi au bénéfice de l’identification idéale

7 Julia Kristeva focuses Bernard’s view of love under the apt heading “Ego affectus est” in Histoires d’amour, 190–​215. 8 Ernesto Buonaiuti, Storia del Cristianesimo, vol. 2: Evo Medio (Milan: dall’Oglio, 1960 [1943]). 9 Ernesto Buonaiuti, Dante come profeta (Modena: Guanda, 1936), especially Chapter V: “L’apocalisse Dantesca,” 115–​63. 10  Nick Havely, Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the “Commedia” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 58–​61.

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Lacanian Psychoanalytics of Self-Love  233 avec l’aimé,” 213). The flesh puts up, in fact, a resistance to idealization and thereby “opens love towards what escapes consciousness” (“ouvre l’amour vers ce qui échappe à la conscience,” 213): love strives, on this account, toward the unconscious. Kristeva finds that Bernard’s psychology and theology of love describe the phenomenon in terms still fitting for our experience of love today: “The tense peace, this painful harmony, this Narcissism of the ‘Me-​body’ (‘Moi-​corps’) inflated to infinity in order to be emptied to the benefit of a violent identification with a sublime alter ego: this is love” (214). Understood psychoanalytically, self-​ reflective love is torn open from within and exposed to alterity in its own most intimate interior. Derrida extends this line of thought, revindicating a “right to Narcissism,” with the provocative thesis that “narcissism has no contrary”: it does not exclude other-​love and is in any case ineluctable.11 This understanding of narcissism follows from the Lacanian troping of psychoanalysis by formal linguistics. The latter discipline furnishes essential insights for elucidating linguistic self-​reflexivity as originating in relation to absolute alterity. Autonomous self-​generation engenders relation to alterity and, in the case of Dante’s theological poem, performs a repetition of divinity.

11  Jacques Derrida, H. C. pour la vie, c’est-​à-​dire … (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 100.

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49  Formal Linguistic Approaches to Self-​Reflexivity

Semiotic theory since Saussure and the discovery of the diacritical nature of the sign emphasizes the capacity of language to generate significance immanently from within itself by virtue of its structure as a differential system of signs. Through its resources of self-​differentiation, self-​ reflection, and self-​referentiality, language is able to confer significance on things outside itself. Especially semiotic theories of the aesthetic sign, as employed exemplarily in poetic language, focus this generative self-​ referentiality. The self-​referentiality of language foregrounded in poetic uses is shown by semiotic research to be a condition of its ability to represent things outside language as well. Such autonomy is sometimes considered in semiotics as normative for the meaningfulness of language in general. Aesthetic auto-​reference of the sign turns up at the base of semiosis and its communicative function in modern linguistic theories beginning from the seminal impulses imparted by Russian formalism. The self-​referentiality of poetic language in particular is an idea that has been analyzed acutely in twentieth-​century poetic theory. Language is typically seen in its “poetic function” as peculiarly non-​representational and, accordingly, as self-​reflexive in nature. From the Russian formalists to the Prague Linguistic Circle, probing research into semiotics and aesthetics revolves around this central issue of the auto-​reflexivity of the poetic sign: it comes to be recognized as not just a prominent characteristic distinguishing poetic language, but also as intrinsic to the functioning of language as such and at all levels. In crucial ways, this auto-​reflexivity stands at the origin of semiosis, or of the signifying process tout court.

Vindicating the Aesthetic Autonomy of the Linguistic Sign Pietro Montani in The Debt of Language excavates the broad basis of semiotic and philosophical thinking that underlies the seminal idea of the self-​referentiality of the aesthetic object (“l’autoriflessività del segno estetico”) and more generally of the sign.1 In this perspective, the aesthetic 1 Pietro Montani, Il debito del linguaggio: Il problema dell-​autoriflessività estetica nel segno, nel testo e nel discorso (Venice: Marsiglio, 1985), 48.

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Linguistic Approaches to Self-Reflexivity  235 function of the sign is not thought of as simply added on to its communicative function. The aesthetic self-​referentiality of the sign turns out to lie at the base of the very ability of the sign to signify—​to represent reality under some form of objectivity and to mediate meaning intersubjectively among members of a community constituted by common values. Montani works from the premise that the scientific pretentions of semiotic theory limited appreciation of its artistic-​poetic implications. Montani emphasizes the aesthetic side of the sign rediscovered in formalist semiotics and their aftermath, thereby bringing out the aesthetic presuppositions and constitution of the sign per se. This model illuminates Dante’s use of poetic language as analogy and as medium in the quest to articulate his experience of God. Dante’s experience in this genre comprises what is best described as a form of linguistic mysticism in which language itself becomes a vehicle to direct experience of the divine. It does not, however, imply that language is simply closed in on itself in a sphere of pure immanence. Montani stresses how the auto-​reflexivity of art proves capable of signifying in a way short-​circuiting reference to a pre-​existent external object. Yet such aesthetic auto-​reflexivity paradoxically reinforces the solidarity between language and things and reinforces the grip of the symbolic upon the real. Self-​referentiality creates a distance from extra-​linguistic reality that turns out mysteriously to foster an even more intimate nearness to it by abrogating the need for an external connection. Montani traces the ways that this becomes the case in key theorists from Jakobson and Victor Schlovsky to Jan Mukarovsky, from Mikhail Bakhtin to Yuri Lotman, Umberto Eco, and Emilio Garroni, and he seeks to interpret the phenomenon philosophically with reference especially to Heidegger’s hermeneutics. Defamiliarization, as an aesthetic principle conceptualized by Schlovsky, entails renewing perception of what is no longer perceived or noticed because it has become familiar through force of habit. In conjunction with making familiar things seem suddenly strange, defamiliarization calls attention self-​reflexively to the sign that is normally supposed to be transparent to what it signifies. The sign is noticed for the first time as a thing in its own right with idiosyncrasies not considered in its use in communication. Language is thereby brought up close for examination, but the effect of this nearness is to provoke the sense of its strangeness. Poetry, accordingly, makes us vividly sense the form of language, which under normal conditions remains for us habitual and imperceptible. In poetry, we experience linguistic form as significant, like the forms of things themselves. Language itself becomes an object of our perception rather than only a medium. Especially when reference fails, language itself becomes perceptible as a thing with sensory qualities in its own right. Witness Rimbaud’s blazing, buzzing “Voyelles”: “A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels, /​I shall tell, one day, of your hidden births” (“A noir,

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236  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation E blanc, I  rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles /​ Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes”). Dante makes language perform in this way, conspicuously and programmatically, with the sparkling letters in the heaven of Jupiter: DILIGITE IUSTITIAM, etc. The letter itself becomes an aesthetic object. This can lead to an idolatry of language, but that is not Dante’s drift in this extraordinary scene in Paradiso XVIII. Instead, the strangeness evoked is ultimately that of the divine mystery dwelling in every letter. Dante presents the letters as preliminary foretastes of his experience of a purely intellectual vision of God. In principle, the whole of the Paradiso is an anticipation of an absolutely imageless experience of divinity without object and in suspension of all finite content.2 Concretely, given the poem’s representational vividness, variety, and abundance, the divine vision is realized self-​reflexively in Paradiso’s poetic language. Focusing on language as object can be a way to make objectivity disappear as an inescapable frame condition of perception. In the theophantic scene of writing in Jupiter, by focusing on language itself as sacred, Dante makes language manifest God directly through intensification of the self-​referentiality of the linguistic sign. This is not exclusive of Dante’s continued, intensive use of language for reference to the world articulated in all its political-​historical lineaments with stunning precision. Yet the pure, iconographical signifying of the sign in auto-​referentiality is also given tremendous relief in the language of the Paradiso. This theme is concentrated into the vision of the letters of Scripture one at a time (or D or I or L …, XVIII.78) displayed as fireworks in the heaven of Jupiter, where language itself shows up as object of the divine vision. Dante’s poem realizes a contemplation in poetic language of divinity as scintillating letters, which metamorphose into the speaking sign or emblem of the imperial eagle. Paradiso highlights this dimension of language used not merely as a sign to refer to something else, but also as a concrete aesthetic object to be experienced in all its sensory intensity. Dante’s Paradiso, in effect, deconstructs the sign and its structure of reference in order to present absolute reality (God) immediately. Most intriguing and perplexing, this trespassing of the sign, this step beyond the referential signifying function of language, opens to an infinite realm beyond language, the realm of the unsayable.3 This stepping outside of the statute of the sign is an un-​founding and re-​founding of language and even reveals the secret or forgotten origin of language. Encrypted in the encounter with Adam in Paradise is a mythical disclosure of the origin of human language. Adam’s phrase “the trespass

2  Marguerite Mills Chiarenza, “The Imageless Vision of Dante’s Paradiso,” Dante Studies 90 (1972): 79–​91. 3  I pursue this in The Divine Vision of Dante’s Paradiso: The Metaphysics of Representation (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

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Linguistic Approaches to Self-Reflexivity  237 of the sign” (“il trapasso del segno”) is used in connection with his original sin, but it also describes the status of language as employed in the Paradiso. Dante’s poetry in the Paradiso redeems language by freeing it from bondage to the law of the sign, with its constitutive division between signifier and signified. The Paradiso liberates poetic language for embodiment of more polyvalent and concrete types of meaning—​for example, the acrostic pattern LVE—​“lue” for “plague” brought on by the unjust rulers in XIX.115–​39. This concrete poetry, like the skywriting of Canto XVIII, produces a more direct form of presence that short-​circuits and exceeds language’s capacities to signify referentially. Dante thus reverses the fall into duality of the sign as divided into rational and sensory components that he duly registers in De vulgari eloquentia (“rationale signum et sensuale,” I.iii.2–​3). Reflexivity, beyond articulated reference, beyond signifying already existing objects, proves key to understanding language’s most essential and universal function—​namely, to reveal and engage the real in its emergence. Such reflexivity proves to be understood best in a theological perspective that reverses certain typical assumptions and orientations of semiotic theory.

Social and Theological Perspectives—Language as Fallen and as Resurrected Mikhail Bakhtin brings to fruition in telling ways the historical promise of the semiotic thinking that budded with the Russian formalists. He, of course, overturns their formalism by attending to the messy contents of history and to the irreducible, unformalizable multiplicity of language and its dialects. His exaltation of the novel and its subversively dialogical discourse is designed to challenge the traditional hierarchy of genres and the hegemony of poetry. For Bakhtin, the poetic word is not originary—​ not a recuperation of an original language of plenitude before the babelic fall into multiplicity. Poetry requires, instead, an elimination of the plurivocity inherent in social discourse and, consequently, a forgetting of history and its evolutionary mutations.4 The poetic verse, in Bakhtin’s view, unlike the novelistic word, is anti-​dialogical and harks back to a Ptolemaic universe that was exploded by the Copernican solar system opening to an infinite universe. If poetic language in its self-​referentiality is regressive for Bakhtin, Dante further seeks out and accentuates certain regressive potentialities of the poetic word—​notably, its access to infancy—​in their profound psychological implications. Yet Dante is himself a revolutionary prophet of the radical plurivocity of the poetic word.5

4  Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 3–40. 5  Dante’s Plurilingualism, Authority, Knowledge, Subjectivity, ed. S.  Fortuna, M. Gragnolati, and J. Trabant (Oxford: Legenda, 2010).

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238  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation And he has himself been widely celebrated as inventor of the (theological) novel.6 For Bakhtin, language is without any intrinsic ontological foundation. It is suspended on the dialogue of social discourse that is always already a response. Bakhtin charges that poetic language forgets this by abstracting and absolutizing language in pure monological self-​ referentiality. However, Dante’s absolute language is infinitely transformative: it is not a static or even a determinable form of language so much as totally beholden to an absolute, indescribable Other. Bakhtin ignores the uncontainable plenitude of the poetic word that reflects the theological Word from which Dante’s poetic language in Paradise gushes.7 The poetic word for Dante becomes almost divinely creative as it penetrates beneath the world of objects to reveal things in their ontological emergence. Dante does not resist the perspective of the social essence and production of language. In De vulgari eloquentia, he gives an account of the post-​Babelic history of language in its differentiated development that coincides with the history of human society and its branching into different groups. Still, like Walter Benjamin, he envisages in biblical terms the theological unity of language before its shattering at Babel.8 The Divine Comedy enacts the rebirth of language, its “resurrection” (“la morta poesì resurga,” Purgatorio I.7) in the poetic word. This original poetic language is, arguably, the “vulgare illustre” that Dante so ingeniously hunts through all the regions and dialects and linguistic registers of Italy, in De vulgari eloquentia I.xi–​xv. The bases of Dante’s theological thinking about poetic language as Word and as revelation are to be found in his practice of poetry just as much as (if not more than) in the theories of his treatises. Dante’s aesthetic re-​elaboration of theological thinking is particularly apt to exhibit the miraculous workings of language in question here. Theologically speaking, infinite Being can be approached only indirectly—​ through negative reference to finite beings. The infinite is found immanent within every being as the in-​definable pure Being that sustains anything that is in being without ever becoming graspable in itself. This infinite abyss of being is what is evoked in the attenuated being of the sign, which exists only as a reference to something else. When this something else is erased 6 Vittorio Russo, Il romanzo teologico: Sondaggi sulla Commedia di Dante (Naples: Liguori, 1984). 7 For an analogous critique, see Renate Lachmann, “Bachtins Dialogizität und die akmeistische Mythopoetik als Paradigma dialogisierter Lyrik,” in Karlheinz Stierle and Rainer Warning, eds., Das Gespräch, Poetik und Hermeneutik XI (Munich: Fink, 1984), 489–​523. 8 Walter Benjamin, “Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen” (1916), in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), vol. 2, pt. 1, 140–​57, trans. Edmund Jephcott, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New  York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 314–​32.

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Linguistic Approaches to Self-Reflexivity  239 and the referentiality of the sign has nothing beyond itself to which to refer, it approaches signifying as pure being. The autonomy of the work of art becomes symbolic and exemplary of the absolutely free and unconditioned being of God. This is the creative being from which the universe and all its complex elaborations of sense emanate. The formalist view of language enables us to glimpse this creativity in act.

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50  Formalist Theory of the Poem and Agamben’s “La fine del poema”

The self-​ reflexive essence of poetry is manifest formally by its being broken into verses. The fact of breaking up the line, irrespective of its sense, in creating verse form calls attention to language and its intrinsic sensual properties as rhythm and sound. The breaking of a line of language that makes it a verse of poetry doubles language back upon itself, interrupting its continuous flow toward referential content in the world outside and beyond it. It becomes a self-​reflective artifact in which language itself, even before what it describes or refers to, stands forth and becomes conspicuous as such. Formalist linguistic theory, specifically the theory of the poetic function of language as consisting in self-​reference—​in language’s turning attention back upon itself—​bears in this way on Agamben’s thinking of the philosophical significance of verse form. In the previously mentioned linguistic and aesthetic definitions of poetry developed by Jakobson and Paul Valéry respectively, the interplay between sound and sense is what particularly distinguishes poetry. Notably rhyme, as a primary mechanism of versification, effects a disjunction between a semiotic event, on the one hand, and a semantic event on the other, and this bifurcation results in an at least subliminal expectation of an analogy in meaning that will correspond to the homophony of the verse. In “La fine del poema,” Agamben defines poetry by the possibility of enjambment that results from the opposition between the syntactical unit of the sentence and the metrical unit of the line.1 Poetry is accordingly based on the possibility of a non-​coincidence of sound and sense—​ or of a disparity between semiotics and semantics—​since inserting line breaks in verse creates a form of language that operates independently of the completion of the sense of the full sentence. Units without complete sense in themselves are isolated as forms of language—​verses—​that are contemplated in their own right. Technically, to the extent that its sense does not necessarily end with the line, any line of verse qua verse 1  Agamben, “La fine della poesia,” Categorie italiane. Studi di poetica (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), trans. Daniel Heller-​Roazen as The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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Formalist Theory of the Poem  241 ends in enjambment. Prose runs continuously to the end of the space available in each line on the page. Poetry (or at least verse), in contrast, breaks discourse into lines in a manner not in obedience to this arbitrary and external limit but rather in accordance with a design of its own choosing. Poetry thereby forges its own internal pattern of sound folding back on itself and foregrounds the form of language (also visually). Understood this way, verse consists in a certain schism between sound and sense: it introduces line limits such that sonorous and semantic units no longer coincide. Karlheinz Stierle treats this phenomenon of prosody as a “transsyntactical semantics” that opens a new dimension of language.2 Sound is made to stand out as noticeable and meaningful in and for itself rather than merely serving as a vehicle for conveying sense. The space of the poem is opened and assured only by its refraining from a lasting accord between sound and sense. Agamben likens the poem in this respect to the Pauline figure of the katechon evoked in 2 Thessalonians 2:7 as restraining “the lawless one” who will precipitate apocalypse. By preventing the Antichrist from being fully manifest, this figure retards the advent of the Messiah and creates the space of “the time that remains” before the eschaton. Similarly, it is this space of time before the end in which alone poetry can transpire. This is what enables the meaning of a sound to remain open to being reinterpreted by another, further sound rather than being resolved—​as by the final meaning of the Messiah. This makes poetry the most philosophical form of discourse because thought arises and is necessarily provoked where sound and sense, failing to coincide, fall into a void of silence without end—​at the end of the poem. Indeed, at the end (“la fine”) of the poem there can be no enjambment, no opposition between metrical and semantic series. When and where the poem ends, there can be no prosodic break independently of the syntax of the sentence. Paradoxically, the last verse of a poem is not a verse in Agamben’s technical sense based on enjambment because sound and sense necessarily end together: nothing further comes that can create a tension of non-​coincidence between them—​and the verse qua verse depends on just such a discrepancy. There is no poetry anymore, according to Agamben, without this divergence between the syntax of the sentence and the sounds of the poem seeming to suggest a meaning of their own by their very form as sound. Consequently, verse enters into an identity crisis. Poetry turns into prose at the end of the poem. The poem is a poem only by relating itself in the end to non-​poetry. The end brings about a poetic state of emergency (to put it in terms dear to Agamben)—​ an identity crisis for its very being as poetry. The poem qua poem, the poem in principle, should never end. This would, in fact, seem to be the design also of Dante’s terza rima, which can 2  Karlheinz Stierle, “Dantes Reimkunst,” in Das große Meer des Sinns: Hermeneutische Erkundungen in Dantes “Commedia” (Munich: Fink, 2007), 213.

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242  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation be brought to an end only by a forced suspension of its generating principle. Otherwise, the middle line introduces always a new rhyme word that requires a new terzina to take it up so as to complete the rhyme. When the inevitable interruption of this pattern occurs at the poem’s end, the statute of the poem is broken and its status as poem is exceeded. Does this, then, open the poem into mystic nuptials in which sound and sense are finally perfectly one? Or does it not, rather, open the poem into silence and an empty space of Nothing? Rather than engendering ultimate comprehension, the two intensities (sound and sense) which animate language “fall into silence”—​or open into a chasm without end. Agamben echoes Dante in De vulgari eloquentia II.xiii.8: si cum rithimo in silentium cadant: The double intensity that animates language does not resolve itself in an ultimate comprehension but rather plunges bottomless, so to speak, into the silence of a falling without end. In this manner, the poem unveils the aim of its proud strategy: that language manage in the end to communicate itself, without remaining unsaid in that which it says. (Agamben, Categorie italiane, 143–44) A kind of limit case of such artificially produced divergence between sound and sense, the sestina repeats its six terminal words in a rotating order in each of six stanzas or “strophes.” This procedure dislocates rhyme from the strophe to the meta-​strophic level and makes it undecidably sound or sense. The final words of the lines occur as imposed necessarily by this formal scheme, whether they make sense or not. Sense is remade as identical with the sounds in question. Linguistic sense or meaning is thereby rendered concrete as sensation or sensory experience. By such means, the sestina conspicuously incorporates sound into the lap of sense, and poetry becomes an incarnate form of communication. Again, however, this tautological self-​identity in self-​reflection opens into an abyss of Nothing because all finite form and determination of meaning are transcended. We are precipitated into an infinite All or Nothing. Poetry cleaves open a relation to the formless and opens us essentially to the infinite. We need, nonetheless, to be able to express this infinite relatedness in finite forms, and self-​reflection alone enables that to take place.

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51  Self-​Reflexivity and Self-​Transcendence—​Toward the Unknown

Thoroughgoing, unlimited self-​reflection is required to look through all the constructions of self in order to see the self in relation to everything else, and thus to see things whole. This is not literally seeing an object, but rather seeing the infinite and non-​objective in all. It is an existential “seeing” that can be enacted only through the imagination. Such self-​reflection through imagination might equally discern no connection between things and feel only the eternal silence of infinite space that so frightened Pascal (“l’éternel silence de ces espaces infinis m’effraie,” Pensées 206, Brunschvicg ed.). Nietzsche embraced it, but even his Dionysiac affirmation of destruction belongs to this order of existential relation: it is total and concerns reality as a whole. By this account, the reflective self is already dissolved in its first emergence because it emerges as only a figure for a deeper, unfathomable poetic process or event. Self-​reflection deconstructs the self and opens it into the infinite apprehended in finite forms. It is, to this extent, negative and is manifest as language. Especially the language of lyric concentrates and displays this self-​reflexive structure. By virtue of its proclivity for turning back on itself, language, whether lyrical or philosophical, taken to its ultimate consequences, tends to become a monadic whole, a specular, self-​reflexive totality. This makes it a kind of mirror of the world—​an uncanny one that infinitizes world as an endlessly iterable image. The work thus becomes a microcosm that repeats the world’s inner essence. We have been exploring how especially lyric language throws this model of consummate self-​referentiality into relief. However, the essential point I am stressing about self-​reflection is that reflexive consciousness comes home to itself only through self-​transcendence toward an unknown, transcendent order of existence—​toward what can be correspondingly represented as a transcendent (self-​reflexive) divinity. This fundamental condition has been elaborated with philosophical sophistication in Western tradition by apophatic thinkers from ancient Gnostics and medieval mystics to postmodern atheistic philosophers. Dante partakes in this speculative endeavor and shows it at its most fervid and convincing

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244  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation in the “making” of epic-​prophetic poetry distilled to its lyrical essence in the Paradiso. This is why the moment of incapacity, and even of failure, is constitutive of the assault upon the ineffable, or of apophatic expression in its myriad manifestations in the Paradiso—​and still in T. S. Eliot’s “raid on the inarticulate” (“East Coker,” Four Quartets). The reasons for this “failure” concern the nature of self-​ negating or “apophatic” discourse as short-​circuiting reference. However, it is important to realize that the failure of reference is not its suppression or erasure, but rather its reinscription in another, higher mode of self-​ transcending discourse. As Michael Sells observes, Apophasis moves toward the transreferential. It cannot dispense with reference, but through the constant turning back upon its own referential delimitations, it seeks a momentary liberation from such delimitations. In terms of a spatial metaphor, to the linear referential motion apophasis adds a circular turning back (epistrophe). The combination yields a semiotic spiral motion ever deeper into the pre-​ referential ground (or groundlessness) of the discourse.1 An apophatic angle of reflection underscores, furthermore, that reflection is our only means of bringing out what is not reflection but is rather presupposed by it. Modern secular thought attempts to distill everything entirely into reflection, hence into immanence. By reflection, the objectivity of the world is made over—​and is taken into—​the self as a reflection of itself. This is crucially different from Gasché’s view (section 16) of reflection in a certain moment of German idealist tradition as always dividing and objectifying the world over and against the subject. Just as important is reflection as entailing a mediation that makes subject and object indiscernible.2 This, in fact, is the standpoint of “absolute reflection” as it is developed and defined by Hegel.3 In an analogous manner, Deleuze discovers a postmodern immanence that underlies reflection.4 Such absolute immanence is not produced by reflection, yet it can be brought to consciousness and is made perceptible only by reflection. Here we encounter the apophatic that cannot be sublated into reflection because it shows up only in the aporias and failures of reflection. It emerges as such for Deleuze himself in the guise of baroque paradox and enigma—​of what escapes mediation by

1  Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9. 2 Thomas A.  Carlson, The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 3  Dieter Henrich, “Hegels Logik der Reflexion,” Hegel-​Studien 18 (1978), 203–​324. 4  Gilles Deleuze, “L’immanence: une vie …,” in Philosophie 47 (1995): 3–​7.

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Self-Reflexivity and Self-Transcendence  245 thinking.5 It shows Scotus’s metaphysics cracking at its seams. As these connections themselves tend to hint, this apophatic dimension of consciousness disclosed through self-​ reflection and mystical experience cannot but be ambiguous in its expressions.

5 Daniel Colucciello Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-​Secularism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

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52  The Ambiguity of Self-​Reflection in Contemporary Thought and History

It is telling that the supreme ethical commandment of Christianity—​ “Love thy neighbor as thyself”—​is formulated self-​reflexively. Self-​love is assumed and presupposed as model for love of other. This formulation follows and formally completes the commandment to love God: “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ ” (Matthew 22:37–​39). The injunction enjoining to seemingly exclusive love of God, the Transcendent, asserts its supremacy and yet, at the same time, is echoed in a second commandment which is “like it” and which is based on a reflexive structure of self-​love enjoining love of neighbor in the likeness of love of self. Self-​love is thus bound into love per se, even into love of the absolutely divine. The indispensable sources of Matthew 22:37–​39 are to be found in Leviticus 19:18 and in Deuteronomy 6:5. We can trace an ambiguity in self-​reflection as it evolves from classical Hebrew to Christian thought and then continues to develop in some of its revolutionary aspects throughout the Middle Ages. Self-​reflection persistently shows up as the means of affirming—​but also eventually of surpassing—​the self in and through love. Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls (Le Mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et désir d’amour) contemporary with Dante in the first decade of the fourteenth century offers a crucial parallel to his work in opening especially lyric insight into this dialectic of courtly love. Comparable in this regard is another work by a late thirteenth-​century female mystic, Metchthilde of Magdeburg’s The Flowing Light of the Godhead (Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit).1 Both works combine poetry and prose fluidly in elaborating a courtly discourse by a self-​reflective empirical “I,” an “I” who is 1 Peter Dronke, Verse with Prose from Petronius to Dante: The Art and Scope of the Mixed Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 95–​114. Metchthilde gives her own title more exactly as “A flowing light of Godhead”: “Dis buoch heisset ein vliessendes leiht der gotheit” (140, n.47).

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Self-Reflection and Contemporary Thought  247 thereby heightened to a higher, universal instance speaking with a prophetic voice and revealing divinely inspired visions. The cult of the image of the beloved, who morally improves and in other ways betters the lover, raising him above himself and purifying him as in a refiner’s fire, is constitutive of the Troubadour service of fin amor. It develops against a background of the Gnostic-​influenced Cathar heresy in southern France and in the kingdom of Aragon in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.2 Relations between Cathars and Troubadours were complex, and there was tension between the cult of exalting the senses and that of their strict refusal, yet these two cultures developed together in the same medieval courts, where they reinforced each other’s emphases on seeking spiritual refinement and perfection. The ambiguity of woman and of sex in the spirituality of Christianity and its heresies might be resolved to some extent by distinguishing between this world, in which life is, after all, material and sensual, and the next, as entirely spiritual and free from material constraint. However, ambiguity remains endemic to the nature of self-​reflection as anchored in—​yet also as destabilizing—​the self that is reflected and reflecting. Self-​reflection opens upon an infinity that relativizes all determinate codes and worldly standards. The present Part (IV) examines some underlying reasons for the ambiguity of “speculation” in philosophy by describing how the speculative tradition of the West produces it formally and linguistically. This ambiguity is concentrated into the ambivalent figure of Narcissus, which will be taken up again in the final Part (V). The core of the present Part—​in the following subsections—​is constituted by an original critical reflection that is very much of our own historical moment. It looks at self-​ reflection in its two different and sharply contradictory guises as: 1) a structure of thought characterizing conscious, reflective persons educated in the traditions of the humanities; and 2) the mechanism driving technology all the way to our present digital age and its upheavals. These two world-​ historical manifestations of self-​ reflection together display its divergent and apparently incompatible propensities. The momentous tensions between them are played out also in our every thought and action. Phenomena of thought can be broken down into a circuitry of neurological loops folding back on themselves—​or else the latter can be reflected back into the inexhaustible mysteries of consciousness.

The Ambiguity of Self-​Reflection as Means to Self-​Transcendence or as End-​in-​Itself Self-​reflection is the means by which the subject first brings itself into being. Subjectivity is constituted by the capacity of consciousness to 2 Tobias Churton, Gnostic Philosophy (Lichfield, UK: Signal, 2003), Chapter  6: “The Troubadours.”

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248  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation reflect upon itself and grasp itself as an immanent realm of self-​awareness and autonomous action. Power is gained over others and over one’s environment by not reacting directly and immediately in response to them. In such immediate, bilateral relations, the human subject is likely to be overpowered by the forces of nature and is, as often as not, outmatched even by members of its own species. Instead of directly opposing superior force in quixotic fashion, we can leverage power by constructing a self-​ enclosed system or grid that we ourselves mold and control. By managing some such construct that we master, and by extending it gradually, we can build on the modest powers that we possess by nature and can enhance their scope. The advance of civilization has augmented the wherewithal of power constructed in this manner almost beyond imagining. At the most basic level, this repetitive self-​reflective mechanism might be illustrated simply by the building of a wall, stone by stone. It is possible to erect an impregnable bulwark in which each piece is chosen and shaped and then integrated with the others in an interlocking network by repeatedly applying the same methods to the same type of basic materials. In one of the most primitive forms imaginable, such a construction embodies the principle of simple repetition of the same: it demonstrates the practical power of mechanical self-​reflexivity. Modern technology has proved capable of expanding such deliberately, self-​reflexively generated power on a fabulous scale. In laser technology, for instance, a series of mirrors is used to reflect again and again the same beam of light and thus to multiply it exponentially in intensity. Almost any system of circuitry in our myriad devices operates on an analogous principle of endless reduplication. These mechanisms work almost like magic in creating internally coherent programs that efficaciously act upon external reality simply by regulating, through repeating patterns, their own internal circulation of information. By turning inward and relating directly only to itself, the self’s (or original cell’s) initial power can be gathered and multiplied deliberately and artificially. Through such methods of self-​replication, the self is enabled, then, to relate indirectly, but with redoubled force, to the outer world. This type of power can be multiplied without limit to produce comprehensive systems with virtually uncontainable potential to further the reach of our command. There is a kind of “cunning of reason” (Hegel’s “List der Vernunft”) in not attempting to match force by force, confronting nature and others directly, but rather withdrawing into a sphere that one can construct and control for oneself. Through such methods, we can attempt then to deal on our own terms with the reality that lies outside the calculable, manageable circuits that we create. We create a system for ourselves through which we can define and dominate a realm of our own making and shaping. Actually, what we control is not the world as such in its own intrinsic reality but only the forms of it that we recognize and construe in our conceptually constructed system. We substitute a humanly concocted

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Self-Reflection and Contemporary Thought  249 model for nature itself in the unsoundable depths of its own being: in its intrinsic reality and alterity, the real remains for us a closed book. The entire technological apparatus of modern civilization that spans and harnesses the earth, garnering its “resources” for human use, is made possible and is brought into being in this manner through self-​reflection. Self-​reflection is a source of power that is quite different from the immediate, raw power of nature. A different kind and order of force is created by self-​reflection and its formalizations. This force is no longer immediate like that of the weight of a stone or the pressure of the wind. It is of a different order from the might of an approaching tidal wave or the destructive burning consumption of a forest fire. The uncanny, self-​ engendered force of self-​reflection is realized through renunciation of first-​order force, as Adorno and Horkheimer so effectively argued and illustrated through reference to the archetype of Odysseus.3 This new type of human hero is distinguished by using technical devices and craft to worst his enemies and to triumph over superior natural violence, exemplarily in the shape of the Cyclops. The specifically human power of self-​reflection is based on self-​denial and subjection of life, with its instincts and impulses, to a rule of law and order. All civilized order is founded on such application of force first against oneself. Adorno and Horkheimer expose the original act of sacrifice on which the order and power of society are built as a kind of second-​degree barbarism. They relentlessly strip away the masked violence from bourgeois society in the postwar world, but they also go all the way back to the antecedents of the Enlightenment in archaic Greece. Odysseus is examined in detail from the Homeric source and is made to stand out as a first archetype of bourgeois self-​mastery for the sake of achieving domination over others and over nature. The source of his exemplary and formidable empowerment is, in effect, at its roots, the power of self-​reflection—​of critical thinking and conscious calculation manifest in self-​restraint. Humanity gains power in this indirect, sometimes devious, way by withdrawing from direct engagement with external reality and, instead, self-​reflectively defining for itself a world of immanence made up of formalized objects that are abstract and exist only in the world created by human spirit and for human consciousness. This has been the recipe for technological progress and the magic formula for gradually achieving sovereignty over nature. Let us be clear, however, that what is dominated is not really nature itself but only a formalized schema, an abstract version or model of it. We can destroy “nature” as we understand it, but the chemical substance is all still there and, on its own terms, is not in the least deranged. Only in relation to us and our conceptions and needs are its order and amenities damaged. What we call “mastering nature” is 3 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 1944), trans. E. Jephcott as Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. G. S. Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

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250  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation really only making arrangements for ourselves within the compass of its own unrepealable dictates. These arrangements have value and validity for us alone. Nature is not dominated. It follows only its own laws in reacting to everything that we do. What has changed is that our relation to ourselves utilizes natural elements in ways that we find convenient or advantageous. Does this necessarily come at the price of ignoring nature, or can we enter into more intimate relation with nature by such interactive arrangements? On this question, our fate hangs in the balance.4 Self-​reflection emerges in modern thought and history as an awesome and mighty—​ but also destructive and tragic—​ technique for wielding power. It relates everything to the self, putting the self and its own preservation and self-​aggrandizement always first. Self-​reflection is not just an epistemological posture or habitus but also a form of relating to others within the world—​yet  always only through and as a means, first and finally, of relating to oneself. The brutally cold and relentlessly calculating mentality of bourgeois culture, as analyzed by Marx and Engels, subjects love and desire and everything else to the individual subject and its all-​devouring egotism. The alarming consequences become evident in the fully unleashed global capitalism of colonialist and consumerist societies. One would want to reject self-​reflection wholesale after witnessing the ravages it brings about in our contemporary world. The accusations brought against it in the tribunals of moral conscience concerning human rights and of consciousness of its environmental impact are staggering.

Critical Wisdom versus Technological Framing There is, however, also another way of understanding self-​reflection, one that Dante can help us to discern. In this alternative optics, self-​reflection is not an attempt to recreate or refound the universe with the self at its center as the origin and end of itself and the world. Instead, reflection is—​ and knows itself as—​a response to an Other. At least for human subjects, self-​reflection in this outlook is not the establishing of the whole universe on the single postulate of the isolated self-​grounding and self-​founding “I” or cogito. The structure of self-​reflexivity, in this alternative way of appropriating it, places us rather into relation with a whole universe that is there without us and before us (though not as articulable in our discourse). For Dante and his culture, reflection places us in the bosom of God as participants and as reflexes within the divine self-​reflection. This other understanding and practice of self-​reflection is something that we stand in dire need of recuperating in our self-​alienated age. It is possible for self-​reflection to be not an assertion of the autonomous power of the individual, but rather a way of discovering the ground of oneself beyond 4  Bruno Latour, Politiques de la nature: Comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie (Paris: La Découverte, 1999) addresses this question by exploring the shifting and indefinable interface between nature and human society.

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Self-Reflection and Contemporary Thought  251 one’s own powers in the relations that bind us to others and to the conjecturable Ground of all things in their togetherness, which we can only imagine. To this end, certain theological and poetic imaginations of self-​ reflexivity, which are of great sublimity, call to be revived and saved from the cultural politics condemning a whole civilization for the crimes and deviations perpetrated by its betrayals and failures. We need to understand anew the place of self-​reflection in the constitution of our selves as human beings and of our civil societies and cultural and natural worlds. Self-​reflection could and should be an inexhaustible and indispensable resource for contemporary identity politics, as much as for the millenary Western civilization that those politics so relentlessly contest in our academies today. Self-​reflection, as the principal motor of our progress, and as exploited for the distinctive achievements of modernity, can be a way of ignoring nature and paying attention only to our own artificial constructions. This has become the case today on an unprecedented scale. But self-​reflection can also be a way through which we relate to others, including nature, as unknown. For self-​relation to be this, we have to leave our systematic knowledge always open at the base and at its outer limits to what we do not know. Only this leveraging from the unknown vitalizes everything that is known, preventing our knowledge from turning into a spectrous, dead, mechanical system cut off in sterile autonomy. Our relations, which, to the extent that we comprehend them, are species of self-​relation, must become relations to what we do not comprehend but must rather seek to relate to and acknowledge as beyond the scope of our conceptual powers. The intricate detail of natural phenomena can be charted and analyzed, but where that vital force comes from—​and the fact that it is at all—​remain metaphysical mysteries to be contemplated: they cannot be coerced by any formula. A knowing that reflects on itself completely, and not just within the parameters of some specific project of deliberate manipulation, has to recognize its limits and open itself beyond itself to the infinite mystery of all that is. It must recognize the inexplicable fact that there is anything at all, something rather than nothing—​to evoke Leibniz’s famous formulation of the metaphysical question. Following this path, self-​reflection has to reflect self-​critically so as to break out of its own self-​enclosed circuits.

Self-​Reflection in the Tension between Science and Mysticism Thus, self-​reflection points in some very different, even opposed directions on the terrain of our cultural heritage. However, Dante holds both of these tendencies together in tension. Self-​reflection can be a homogenizing mechanism that turns everything into the same—​or it can be the means of opening the self toward radical otherness. In one case, self-​ reflection creates a structure—​ essentially a code—​ with an internal

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252  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation coherence that enables mastery and manipulation of a constructed system. It circumscribes and defines the real in terms of its own. One’s self-​referential system can generate a world all its own that need not even admit the existence of others except as mere material—​as grist for its mill. In this case, self-​reflection is technical and mechanical. This type of self-​reflection leads toward and enables the technological applications of science in all their inestimably powerful workings. This is the inadvertent legacy of Duns Scotus outlined in Part II. But self-​reflection can also lead toward a kind of “transhumanization.” This is much more the case with self-​reflection taken to be a reflection of theological transcendence on the model of Dante’s trasumanar. This path entails open-​ended searching in a psychological-​existential register of reflection. Such self-​reflection opens us to an unfathomable and uncontrollable depth within rather than empowering us to imprint our own image forcibly on the world through a schematized system that brings it under our control. This latter is the “mystical” way of self-​reflection along which Narcissus can be redeemed. Such self-​reflection does not establish itself as the foundation of everything but rather erases its finite self in opening to a larger reality in which it is itself reflected. Such reflection opens itself to “divine” self-​reflection. By this latter route, what one learns to know, fundamentally, is that one does not know. This was the wisdom that set Socrates apart from other men, according to his own understanding of the Delphic oracle (Apology 20e–​24c). The knowing of one’s own unknowing underlies a tradition of negative theology that stretches from Dionysius to Eriugena and Eckhart and from Augustine to Bonaventure and Nicholas of Cusa. Cusanus, as the last in this series of pathbreakers, makes self-​reflection programmatic under the title of “learned ignorance.” He also enacts a self-​reflective, mystical-​dialectic seeing of the invisible in De visione Dei (1453). This genealogy forms one axis along which the mystical potency of self-​reflection, counterbalancing its scientific powerfulness, plays out historically. However, the wisdom of ignorance can itself be conceived of as a kind of science. It was so conceived by Giambattista Vico (1668–​ 1744) in his Scienza nuova (1744).

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53  The Historical Turn of Self-​ Reflection in Vico’s New Science

Vico’s great breakthrough, and the generative principle of his “new science,” is to reverse the science of the Enlightenment based on investigating the book of Nature, claiming to discover in mathematics its native language. Vico directs science, instead, to focus self-​reflectively on the human world of culture—​ of history transmitted through philological tradition and investigated by anthropology and archeology—​as its true and proper object. This is the world that humans can understand because they have made it. The only truth to which we have access is what we ourselves have made (verum ipsum factum)—​that is, history rather than nature. Classical antiquity is not so foreign to us as our natural environment. The ancient world has been produced by human beings and is still alive within us. We ourselves have made the historical world. Therefore, we can know it through reflection on the principles of our own minds. The world of nature, however, was not made by us: as the creation of a transcendent divinity, it remains forever strange and inaccessible to us in its inner workings. Vico’s seminal insight, his “indubitable principle” answering to and countering Descartes’s cogito, is laid out with typically baroque stylistic elaborateness in the third section (“De’ Princìpi”) of Book I of the Scienza nuova: But in such a dense and tenebrous night in which the first and from us most distant antiquity is covered there appears the eternal light, which never sets, of this truth, which cannot by any means be called into doubt: that this civic world has certainly been made by men, of which the principles can, since they must, be found within the modifications of our own human mind. It must cause anyone who thinks about it to marvel at how all philosophers seriously strove to achieve scientific knowledge of this natural world, of which God alone possesses scientific knowledge because he made it; and they neglected to meditate on this world of the nations, or rather this civic world, which because men had made it they were able to attain to scientific knowledge of it.

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254  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation (Ma in tal densa notte di tenebre ond’è coverta la prima da noi lontanissima antichità, apparisce questo lume eterno, che non tramonta, di questa verità, la quale non si può a patto alcuno chiamar in dubbio: che questo mondo civile egli certamente è stato fatto dagli uomini, onde se ne possono, perché se ne debbono, ritrouvare i principi dentro le modificazioni della nostra medesima mente umana. Lo che, a chiunque vi rifletta, dee recar maraviglia come tutti i filosofi seriosamente si studiarono di conseguire la scienza di questo mondo naturale, del quale, perché Iddio egli il fece, esso solo ne ha la scienza; e trascurarono di meditare su questo mondo delle nazioni, o sia mondo civile, del quale, perché l’avevano fatto gli uomini, ne potevano conseguire la scienza gli uomini.)1 However, Vico first articulated his verum-​factum principle in De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda libri tres (1710).2 Its roots can be traced to the Scholastic dictate that God alone knows what he makes: solus scit qui fecit,3 which is echoed also in Cusanus (De docta ignorantia, II.xii). Applied to humans, who do not make themselves as such but only their own historical worlds, this principle relates knowing to the Unknown. This marks the crucial difference between Vico’s science and that of other modern philosophers. He stresses that his science shows how “man makes all things out of ignorance” (homo non intelligendo fit omnia). Vico’s imaginative metaphysics reverses the illusion of rational metaphysics that knowledge rather than unknowing enables and controls human creation (Scienza nuova, 405). Whereas God creates things purely by knowing them, the first humans or “poets” created human culture and civilization through “robust ignorance” (“robusta ignoranza,” 376). Even what humans do make and can know is made ignorantly: they ignore their own creative role and believe their own inventions (“fingunt simul creduntque,” Scienza nuova, 376). Only self-​reflection can expose this self-​deception so that such “knowing” becomes true or undeceived knowledge. Vico pursues the scientific quest self-​reflectively and turns this pursuit against modern science as we know it, which is based on the model of the physical sciences. Vico’s “new science” is not that of the modern scientific revolution. He links his science instead to the ancient wisdom

1 Giambattista Vico, Princìpi di scienza nuova, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Milan: Ricciardi, 1953), 330. Following the usual practice in Vico studies, passages are cited by their paragraph numbers or “capoversi,” referring to the Scienza nuova of 1744. 2   G. Vico, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710), trans. L.  M. Palmer as On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 45–​46. 3 Rodolfo Mondolfo, Il verum-​factum prima di Vico, Studi Vichiani 1 (Naples: Guida, 1969).

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Self-Reflection and Vico’s New Science  255 of self-​reflection as it has been pursued in the human sciences (scienze umane) and in wisdom traditions of human culture since antiquity. He makes knowledge a matter of self-​reflection. Such self-​knowledge features a knowledge of human limits (“i confini dell’umana ragione,” 360) that opens us to what we do not make and cannot as such know. We can only attempt to indicate, or perhaps “imitate,” this unknown. Vico, in effect, turns scientific knowing inside out and orients it fundamentally to the Unknowable. Of course, it is still science and therewith by definition a knowing, but it is such by remaining in contact with the Other as an Unknown that transcends it. Opening knowledge toward this unknowable otherness is the (covert) achievement of Vico’s original method in his “new science.”4

Dialectic and Coincidence of Secular and Sacred In spite of his momentous discovery of the historical dimension of humanity, Vico still believes, like Aristotle, that the proper object of science can only be eternal essences. Like Cusanus, Vico takes mathematics as an exemplary model for all fields of knowing. But unlike the natural scientists, he considers mathematical objects to be the free inventions of the human mind rather than any sort language of nature (Galileo). Because we make them, we can know them. The same holds also for much more practical and primitive inventions of human beings like religious rites. An archaic model for the fundamental character of knowing as a human construction through doing can be found in cultic ritual. Whereas constructive geometry counts as the model of certain knowledge in modern authors such as Descartes and Spinoza, Vico privileges religion as resource for our substantive scientific knowledge. Religions are primordial historical institutions made by humans and keys to a science of history and culture. Hegel’s philosophy is similarly turned toward human spirit and its activity as the maker of its world. World history is its home, not nature or the stars. Spirit goes out of itself into the world, dividing itself in Selbstentzweiung (“self-​ diremption”) and exiting from itself in Selbstäußerung (“self-​ externalization”). Yet it does so in order to achieve freedom from external conditioning by sublating the Other that it encounters in nature or history, remaking this Other in its own image as itself and its own. Through its unceasing activity, Hegelian spirit appropriates everything back into itself. It has no intrinsic content of its own apart from this activity of mediating all that is other than it. Hegel corrects the Kantian dualism of theory and practice, intensifying the sense 4  Giuseppe Mazzotta’s recapitulatory concluding remarks in The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) illuminate Vico’s orientation to the Other and Unknown against the detailed backdrop of scientific discovery in his day (251–​52).

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256  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation in which we come to know even our own selves together with everything else only by acting in history. Karl Löwith highlights the secularizing drift of Vico’s observations on the verum-​factum principle as it was relayed by Hegel and the German Idealists and then further exploited by Benedetto Croce.5 But Vico’s inference from his principle is emphatically not that humans are the only makers of the world they inhabit. Quite to the contrary, Vico recognizes the divine agency of providence as the guiding principle of history. Although humans are able to know the historical world because they are actively involved in forging it, they do so always only in relation to something—​or rather Someone—​else. There is a dialectic between human making and divine providence. The divine corrects the human (“talvolta tutte contrarie ai proponimenti degli uomini,” 343), which over the course of time, in Vico’s corsi and ricorsi, inevitably devolves into humans acting self-​destructively against their own interests. Vico sees providence as operating in history more essentially, or at least more intelligibly, than in nature. We cannot understand its operation in nature because we do not participate in making nature. The cause and ends of Creation are revealed, instead, through the relation of God with humanity. Personal, historical relations are primary in the Christian vision and in biblical narration, since they are what we as human beings can understand. In denying the truth for secular philosophy that humans make their own world by themselves, Vico is diametrically opposed to Hegel—​or at least to left-​wing Hegelians (Linkshegelianer). Human making for Vico is not autonomous; it is, rather, bound to a divine Will, which “provides” for humans. What actually results from history is far different from what humans aim at and envisage. This is acknowledged even by certain secularists in their recognition of unconscious drives as principles dominating human destiny. Still, they are determined to remain blind to any higher purpose. A  chief significance for Vico of that higher purpose turns out to be to preserve a dimension of the humanly Unknown as an orienting lodestar. This makes his new science “uncanny.”6 The verum-​factum principle entails an absolute epistemological skepticism: the original poet creators know not what they do. They are absolutely creative in their unknowing. Later, rational reflection becomes aware of this ignorance at the origin of language and culture, yet remains still beholden to it. All cultured knowledge is founded on original ignorance.

5 Carl Löwith, Vicos Grundsatz: verum et factum convertuntur. Seine theologische Prämisse und deren säkulare Konsequenzen (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1968). 6 Sandra Rudnick Luft, Vico’s Uncanny Humanism: Reading the New Science between Modern and Postmodern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 64–​65.

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Self-Reflection and Vico’s New Science  257

Reflecting to the Origins of Thinking By his method of “recollective memory,” Vico attempts the nearly impossible task of reproducing in his own mind the pre-​ rational thought processes of the first humans, those who crossed the threshold to symbolic thinking.7 Vico reads history as the record of humanity’s unwitting self-​reflection by projection of itself onto the world. Human thought begins among the humanoid “giants” by their first distinguishing between heaven or the sky above and the earth beneath. They do so under the shock of terror induced by the experience of thunder and lightning as expressing the “anger” of an immense body, the sky, which is apprehended as such for the first time through this assignment of a meaning. The sky for them initially is not an object, nor even a phenomenon. It can first be discerned at all only analogically as a wildly agitated body—​like the giants’ own bodies when they are angry. Vico elucidates the Latin word “Jove,” originally “Ious,” and in Greek “Zeus,” as imitating the fracas of thunder. These names embody onomatopoetic reminiscences of the clash of thunder or the hissing sound of lightning (“Ed esso Giove fu da’ latini, dal fragor del tuono, detto dapprima ‘Ious’; dal fischio del fulmine da’ greci fu detto Ζεύς,” Scienza nuova, 447). The terrifying violence of storms had, of course, been experienced by primates repeatedly since time immemorial. But only once this violence is retained through the invention of an image such as that of an overwhelmingly powerful body—​the sky, “Zeus” in anger—​does human thought begin. Thought begins, in Vico’s understanding, with such a “theological” imagination impressing itself on memory through fear of some divinity (“spaventoso pensiero d’una qualche divinità,” 338). This first human thought reaches momentously beyond mere sensation, which is forgotten the moment it ceases. Such a thought enables an objective world to emerge from the sheer immediacy of sensation in the first place. Imagining such a thought takes us back to the pre-​reflexive origin of all reflection. Reflection in philosophy typically deems itself to begin from given objects, but Vico explains (by repeating and enacting) how the mind can first begin to give itself anything as an object. He underlines its doing so on the basis of, and in continuity with, sensation and imagination, its only resources at this stage. Subsequently, the mind can reconstruct and self-​reflectively simulate its own emergence through such sensorial imagining. This simulating does not consist in just a formal exercise performed on alien material given to the mind from outside. It is rather a self-​knowing by the mind of its own thought-​processes. Nevertheless, the origin of

7  Donald Phillip Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 99ff.

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258  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation thought is “known” in this case principally as an unknowing—​as a limit of knowing. Something in itself unfathomable is figured anthropomorphically in terms of oneself, which makes it seem understandable. Such knowing runs up against “ignorance,” out of which the first words—​ names for God—​ are invented as “imaginative universals,” namely “Zeus,” followed by “Cybele” and “Poseidon” and then the pantheon of twelve further divinities, producing a world order beginning from differentiations between Sky and Earth and Sea. Vico’s theories suggest how all possibility of reflective thinking is grounded on an immediacy that is imagined mythologically and theologically and that is understood as engendering the earliest possibility of thought. “God” (not yet one or many) is the figure of the absolutely Other experienced first in undifferentiated sensation, but then made thinkable by being figured in terms of oneself, of “one’s own” being—​of the body and emotions, which are most immediately present in experience. Thought is reflexive, but still a relation to the unknown. In order to comprehend Vico’s new science, one has to imagine one’s way back into the mind of the first humans, those who cross the threshold from sensation to thought. One has to recreate by one’s own reflection the experience of making a world ordered into objects, starting from the distinction (where none previously existed) between heaven and earth. This undertaking involves the immense difficulties that Vico says cost him twenty years of research (338)—​of applying self-​reflection in order to envisage the immediacy (or otherness-​to-​reflection) that precedes and exceeds all thought. This odyssey to discover the first operation of the human mind (“prima operazion della mente umana,” 699)  has to be carried out by the imagination reflecting back to the source of its own thinking. Critical employment of imagination is required to work against the natural (Narcissistic) tendency of thought always to assimilate everything to the already familiar (120–​28). Instead, the mind must be made to confront its ignorance. This beginning from ignorance is the first pre-​ requisite for reenacting through imagination the origin of human thought and culture.

Self-​Reflective Imagining of the Unknowable: From Vico to Dante Vico’s new science reflectively reconstructs the mind’s knowledge of itself through the principles of its own modifications (“i princìpi dentro le modificazioni della nostra medesima mente umana,” 331). In this science, philosophy and philology coincide (138–​40), since facts and ideas alike are forged by the imagination. It requires our becoming ignorant of what we think we know, as if there were no books in the world (330), in order to free ourselves of the conceit—​or the ignorance turning to arrogance—​ of philosophers and scholars alike, as well as of “nations” (120–​28, first four axioms). All are imprisoned within their own language, as if it were

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Self-Reflection and Vico’s New Science  259 the true and standard one, and do not discern or suspect its origin beyond them in the common and “providential” nature of humanity. Instead of taking our own world of objects as the true one that other cultures have fantastically described in their variously deviant and erroneous ways, we ought to see our ignorance of the real beyond our ken. For out of this ignorance, all articulate knowledge arises. Self-​reflection on this ignorance at the origin of our own and of all knowledge is the key to a true science, to a veritable knowing of ourselves. We must know—​ by entering into and repeating in recollective imagination—​the human mind’s propensity to invent gods through its ineluctable predicament of absolute unknowing. Poetic theology is rooted in ignorance and is creative of humanity in its essence—​according to an “eternal ideal history” (storia ideale eterna). We do not understand the providential causes or reasons of this history, since we do not make them. The invention of a whole civil world, such as that of the Latin Middle Ages as it is construed in Dante’s Commedia, is understood aright only as expressing this original ignorance of our ultimate Cause. In light of its primordial expression as the language of the gods, this is a “theological” ignorance. Vico devoted Book III of his Scienza nuova to “discovering the true Homer” as crucial to his archeology of human knowledge, and he considered Dante to be the new Homer of the modern vernacular languages.8 As poetic creator, Dante combines the original operation of poetic invention of a world of objects with reflective, recollective memory and imagination. Vico’s new science similarly aims to recover this “original” mental process by repeating it—​by experiencing it from within and thereby knowing the world as our own making. This original invention of thought and language is imagined as happening particularly in the experience of fear in relation to the gods, with which specifically human consciousness, as Vico excavates it, begins. Vico employs self-​ reflection as a method of repeating in his own thought the thought process of humanity in its emerging and its development according to “the eternal ideal history.” As its name suggests, this “history” is not inferred from empirical facts but serves rather as a kind of template for reconstructing facts. The storia ideale eterna is the immediate image of human events as understood by the recollective imagination that is operative in Vico’s own philosophical thinking.

The Unknown and One’s Own Limits Through recollective imagination, Vico discovers the destiny of human knowing to be oriented to the wholly unknown and Other in the guise

8  G. Vico, “Discoverta del vero Dante, ovvero nuovi princìpi di critica dantesca,” Scritti Vari e pagine sparse, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1940), 79–​82.

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260  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation of the divine. He unveils the theological premises inscribed into human self-​understanding from the earliest inception of human culture and its myths. In his transmission of the tradition of Italian humanism, Vico crystalizes a type of self-​reflection that is not performed introspectively simply by the subject upon its own immanent consciousness as cogito (à la Descartes), but rather passes externally through reflection on history. He discovers history, nevertheless, by reconstructing its essential conditions self-​reflectively from the workings of his own mind. He thus knows it internally. However, Vico thinks history through self-​reflectively as the manifestation of divine providence precisely in human self-​contradiction and failing. The providential ends of history are achieved paradoxically by frustrating the conscious ambitions of human individuals and peoples. Vico’s “new” science reflects historically on humanity’s role in “making” the historical world it inhabits. He thus contemplates the only truth that is humanly knowable. Self-​reflection is plied not to circumscribe and ground knowledge in itself, but rather to relate to what surpasses the finite knowing self. This internally invented and elaborated mythical “knowing” is a wholly different quality of self-​reflection from that of the modern science that arises in the seventeenth century as a narrative of gaining progressive mastery over nature. The latter strives after the ideal of a purely objective, analytical knowledge. Vico’s self-​reflection focuses, instead, on humanity’s creative ignorance and so remains engaged with the Other as beyond the self’s ken and as uncontainable within its own sphere of knowing. Vico stands in continuity with Cusanus and the latter’s use of “conjecture” to imaginatively construct in our inner experience what is, properly speaking, unknowable to us. Vico thereby bends and points self-​reflection beyond discrete facts and entities. Despite the “certainty” of its archeological and philological artifacts, the world emerges for Vico not only as a compact, circumscribed ensemble of elements lending itself to be known by decomposition into parts. The finite order is rather invaded and illuminated by an ungraspable whole beyond it. Finitude reflects a light that is not its own—​as in the emblematic frontispiece that epitomizes the overall idea of the Scienza nuova. It features “Metaphyics” reflecting a beam of light from the eye of divine providence down to the poet—​Homer, surrounded by artifacts of divination and the arts. The concrete specifics of history and culture are illuminated against a background of the open and unfathomable—​the infinite—​to which they give form and articulation. The historical world consists thereby not just of hard and opaque facts. Instead, it becomes translucent to another order of the real—​Vico calls it an “ideal eternal history”—​that is not empirically manifest and that can only be imagined. History, however secularized it has become in modern times, has for Vico a “theological” dimension and ground. This constitutive relating of human knowing to an inhuman Unknown is a work of self-​reflection that inverts the purely rational science of self-​ reflection, which aims to found itself on grounds exclusively of its own

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Self-Reflection and Vico’s New Science  261 determination. Self-​reflection in the Cartesian tradition is a purely formal enterprise that fabricates self-​ identity and avoids the task of radical, critical reflection on the self in its uncontrolled, unlimited relation with others. The latter is too upsetting for the Cartesian foundations project of human self-​assertion and mastery of nature, but that is precisely what Vico’s “science” exacts. Cartesian reflection, right from the Discours de la méthode (1637), neutralizes any exteriority facing humanity as an incomprehensible Other in order to erect self-​ grounding, self-​ authenticating foundations for science. Vico’s historical-​critical approach, in contrast, takes up its task under the sign of Socrates, the archetype of critical and especially self-​ critical reason. Socrates was recognized by Cusanus as the philosophical father of negative theology (De docta ignorantia I.1.4). Concordantly, Vico designates Socrates as the first to “call down philosophy from heaven” (“primus philosophiam de caelo revocasse”),9 emphasizing his orientation to a higher-​order reality unyielding to rational reduction. Circumscribing humanity’s knowledge as the sphere of its own self-​ relation is for Vico a way not of grounding humanity in itself, but rather of relating it to the non-​human and the natural as an infinite Unknown. This entails a far-​reaching redistribution and realignment of tasks within the constitutive disciplines of this “science.” From early on, modern empirical science was driven by application of principles of mathematicization to nature. However, for Vico, since mathematics is humanly made, nature is not known in its true otherness by such means. It is problematic in Cartesian natural science that humanity utterly fails to truly know itself. By examining things only objectively and ignoring its own subjective shaping hand—​alias the imagination—​ in forging everything, such science treats itself as just another object, as something that conceptual reason can fully grasp. The parceled-​up nature that it recognizes has been produced as an object for a subject, but the mind’s own operation in this production has been occulted behind a myth treating objectivity as purely given. Self-​reflection in Vico, in contrast, turns out to be a method not of focusing on the self as ultimate object, or on the cogito as foundational ground of knowledge and consciousness, as postulated by Descartes, but rather the opposite. By self-​reflection, as Vico practices it, with his method of recollective imagination employed to conjecture or surmise the origins of human thought and language, the self-​conscious and purely introspective self loses all fixed identity. It becomes a mobile locus for imagining its own relation to an unknowable immediacy at the origin of all mediations and reflections of selfhood. Imagination reaching to the 9  Cited from G. Vico, Il De Mente Heroica e gli scritti latini minori, ed. Gian Galeazzo Visconti (Naples: Alfredo Guida Editore, 1996), 15. Electronic edition by L.  Pica Ciamarra and A. Sansone, in “Laboratorio dell’ISPF,”, V, 2008, 1: www.ispf-​lab.cnr.it/​ article/​Testi_​Ed_​Critica_​DeMenteHeroicaDef_​Rev. Accessed 10/​2/​2017.

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262  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation origin of objectivity as such opens the dimension in which everything is related to everything else. This is the dimension that I call “theological” in a sense continuous with Vico’s own unorthodox use of the term. This kind of reflective, and especially self-​reflective, meditation by thought on its origins in its own creative activity is what Verene calls Vico’s “science of imagination.” Rather than simply examining, through technical, objective, scientific means and instruments, the artifacts of history as purely positive givens, Vico constructs his knowledge of them internally through imagining and reenacting a primordial mentality capable of forging them. Vico’s new science is not just an empirical anthropology: it is more deeply a philosophical or self-​reflective philology.

Cyclical Repetition of Birth to Humanity and Barbarism The nature of this self-​ reflection is to be self-​ engendering—​ but also oriented to a creative power or “providence” that transcends it, one that is the Other working in and through its own activity. Self-​reflection in the late age of “men” invents representations that model and enact the structure of human reality by recapturing originary speech. Such speech does not describe given phenomena, but first enables phenomena to be distinctly perceived. What speech accesses is always only the reality that humans create. Once self-​reflection becomes cognizant of this, it places humans in mind of the larger, circumambient reality that they do not create and therefore cannot know. The natural world, of which humans are a part, remains to them an inscrutable mystery that they call “divine.” Thence arises the sense of “piety” that Vico builds into his new science all the way through to its last sentence (1112). This self-​reflexive (un)knowing with which humanity is born takes place according to a logic of opposites and is founded on recognition of what absolutely transcends the human. In history at large, the opposite of what human beings aim at is produced over time. Yet this result is understood from the “ideal eternal” perspective as a kind of ironic working of a higher Mind than the human, one that providentially “guides” human actions—​as in the “esso guida” or “it guides” of Paradiso XVIII.109–​ 111—​and rectifies their waywardness. Reflection here has to surpass and annul its status as reflection. What is envisaged and reached through this self-​critical, self-​negating process is the “common sense” that is “judgment without reflection” (“giudizio senz’alcuna riflessione,” Scienza nuova, 142) in the original poet-​creators of humankind. As purely performative creation, such common sense founds nations as particular historical enactments or microcosms of a universal ideal history. Self-​reflective retrieval of such primordial thought transcends reflection itself. Such creative intuition founds Vico’s “new science” as an encyclopedic understanding of the world capable of being universally shared and verified.

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Self-Reflection and Vico’s New Science  263 Verene prefers not to speak of “self-​reflection” for Vico’s method in the new science. In contrast with Leon Pompa, Verene explains that this science is not a matter of cognition and philosophical argument, but rather of rhetoric and images produced by “fantasia.”10 Certainly, self-​reflection as entailing identity with a fixed conceptual content is exploded. More deeply, however, self-​reflection is a dynamic process of searching for and forging origins by fantasy or imagination through which the human mind enters into the primordial world of its own birth (Scienza nuova, 349). Such self-​reflection is exactly what Vico offers in the rationally reflective age of men subsequent to the heroic creations of Dante and Homer, which are self-​reflective foundings in a more radically imaginative sense. Why should we care to know these origins otherwise than out of antiquarian interest? The modern tendency is to forget about how people, especially archaic people, thought in order to concentrate simply on what is useful to us. This, however, is symptomatic of our modern alienation from authentic knowledge of ourselves. For Vico, we can know not things themselves but only ourselves and the world that we have made in making ourselves what we are. This inextricable self-​referentiality defines the scope and nature of human knowing. Such knowing is in its essence self-​reflective—​like Kant’s critical philosophy, yet based on history rather than on the science of nature. This wisdom gives not only exact knowledge of human affairs. It also opens our minds to awareness of all that we have not made. The laws of providence work against and neutralize our own eventually self-​destructive acts. They thereby express the mystery of being that lies altogether beyond our capacity for understanding—​namely, the mystery of divinity (339). Being open and connected to this supra-​human dimension is what essentially humanizes us in Vico’s and in Dante’s visions alike. This dimension of mystery alone can stand against and resist our cyclical return to the barbarism from which human culture emerges, by which it remains conditioned, and to which, according to Vico’s cycles, it is tragically doomed to return. Crucial for Vico, in sum, is that our knowledge of truth is self-​reflective. We know ourselves, our own activity, in the knowledge of the historical world that is accessible to us because it is of our own making. We know ourselves through what is ostensibly other than us—​other times, other peoples. In this respect, Vico is the true forerunner of Hegel, as many have pointed out and variously demonstrated.11 However, Vico also has a strong, tragic sense of the limits of self-​reflection and of how it becomes perverse in the third phase of the historical corsi, the age of men, when it 10  Vico’s Science of Imagination, 155. Leon Pompa, Vico: A Study of the “New Science” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 11  For example, Jong-​Seok Na, Praktische Vernunft und Geschichte bei Vico und Hegel (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002).

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264  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation leads no longer to wholeness of vision by heroic striving to surpass one’s limits through seeking a sublime otherness, but rather to fragmentation of knowledge among isolated individuals.12 Humans return to a state of barbarism. Yet it is not the first state of barbarism of the senses (“le barbarie della riflessione che non era stata la prima barbarie del senso”). Instead, it is a barbarism of reflection based on “malicious ingeniousness” (“degl’ingegni maliziosi”) and “reflexive malice” (“riflessiva malizia,” Scienza nuova 1106). Scienza nuova 241 describes the cycle passing from the necessary to the commodious to the luxurious and finally to madness. This is the normal course of evolution of ever-​increasing rationality. Imaginative thinking, in contrast, creates an image that metaphorically reflects the wholeness of one’s relation within the world rather than conceptually circumscribing an object cut off from the subject that conceives it. Thought that begins with the creation of images can reflect the self in its unlimited relations striving heroically to surpass its present capacities of comprehension through reaching out imaginatively toward the Unknown by which it is circumscribed and contextualized.13 This quest of the heroic mind aims at truth as an ungraspable whole rather than at analytic certainty (like Descartes). It entails the ideal of humanistic education, which pivots on self-​ knowledge embracing all disciplines without limit and reaching toward the transcendent divinity active in the aspiring heroic mind of each student, as Vico expounds it in his inaugural orations at the University of Naples.14

12  Vico dwells on this historical destiny in his orations on education given at the University of Naples from 1699 to 1707, beginning with the theme: “On Self-​Knowledge.” Le orazioni inaugurali, trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippe as On Humanistic Education: Six Inaugural Orations 1699–​1707 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 13 G. Vico, On the Heroic Mind (De mente eroica, 1732), paragraph 7.  www.ispf-​lab. cnr.it/​index.php?q=article/​Testi_​Ed_​Critica_​DeMenteHeroicaDef_​Rev. Accessed 8/​ 17/​ 2020. 14  Compare Silvia Ruffo Fiore, “Giambattista Vico and the Pedagogy of the ‘Heroic Mind’ in the Liberal Arts,” https://​www.bu.edu/​wcp/​Papers/​Educ/​EducFior.htm. Accessed 8/​ 17/​2020.

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54  Self-​Reflexivity in Paradiso and the Secular Destiny of the West

The historical structure of self-​ reflection, as bequeathed by Italian humanist and German idealist traditions alike, entails both solitariness, or sufficiency unto oneself, and an orientation to a transcendent Source. Reflexivity can be a form of self-​enclosure that lyric language epitomizes most intensively in certain modern Romantic avatars (sections 64–​65). But self-​reflection can also be a fruitful movement radiating out from a center to create and illuminate the universe. Medieval models are most apt to call this to mind. Such self-​reflexiveness is made in the image of divine goodness and bounty, which in its self-​love knows no envy. It unstintingly sparks (sfavilla) or speaks (favella) into existence eternal beauties: “La divina bontà, che da sé sperne   ogne livore, ardendo in sé, sfavilla   sì che dispiega le bellezze etterne”

          (VII.64–​ 66)

The divine goodness, which by itself spurns   all envy, burning in itself, speaks/​sparks   in such manner that it unfolds the eternal beauties. This tercet refracts the Neoplatonic idea of an emanation from the Good, generating love or desire self-​reflexively. The trope is based on Plato’s stipulating that there is no envy in God (Timaeus 29e). The underlying paradigm to which this self-​reflexivity conforms is the myth of Narcissus, but reversed or turned inside out. Together with a number of other Ovidian myths, Narcissus is alluded to from early on in the Paradiso (III.16–​21). The self-​reflexive, narcissistic structure of love is (re)discovered by Dante not as supplanting and excluding the orientation to transcendence. Instead, self-​reflective self-​love first enables an opening to transcendence by becoming itself a reflection of the transcendent. The history of lyric reconstructed here suggests how an orientation to transcendence and even—​in a literal sense—​to “otherworldliness” generates a self-​reflexive humanism that only later turns against and destroys its own source in theological transcendence.

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266  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation Dante defines an autonomous sphere for art. Everything can be artistically mediated and so be made part of a single, coherent order such as the Divine Comedy astonishingly projects. Yet, while discovering the capacity of art to become itself absolute, Dante does not foreclose the possibility of the radical otherness of the absolute. He envisages a true and inexpressible world in comparison to which this artistically mediated world is illusion or even a lie. This is programmatic throughout the Divine Comedy starting from the Inferno, where Dante deals with fraud and highlights especially hermeneutic or interpretive fraud and violence in his own writing and poetry.1 In fact, precisely artistic perfection calls this self-​annihilation forth and enacts an effacement of itself. Dante’s absolutizing of his art is taken as a gesture not of excluding an other, higher, divine reality but of eliciting a relationship to it by “imitation.” His is a self-​consuming artifact that nevertheless persists as a sign of the absolute Other that it is not. The poem is about its own ongoing erasure, by which it asymptotically approaches the absolutely Other. Truth is in the hands of the transcendent—​recognized by Dante as God. Yet this recognition authorizes Dante to traffic here and now in images. On this basis, a suspect value such as semblance can be revalued as a path back to the truth of our being. The lyric signs and images that Dante creates become, in the end, sacramental. Transcendence can be achieved by the lyric’s remaining within the formal and self-​enclosed sphere of pure feeling, even while allowing for an objective reality transcending it. Lyrical language is informed, pervaded, and rejoiced by the real precisely because it does not define a relation to any real referent and so does not representationally objectify the reality that inspires it. For this reason, lyrical language makes possible the real presence of the transcendent in concrete elements of form and material signifiers.2 The Paradiso is uncontestedly a superlative achievement of lyric art. This does not mean that it does not contain much discursive exposition as well: the poem is a consummate expression of the self in the plenitude of language as both song and sense. Paradiso is, moreover, an absolute peak in the literature of the quest for the ineffable Other. Lyric self-​reflexivity, indeed, for Dante still represents an imitation and communication of transcendent divinity. Dante’s Paradiso embodies the unity of aesthetic and religious values that in later periods of Western culture will fall apart and come to seem irreconcilable. It was prepared for in the two centuries

1  I argue this in The Revelation of Imagination, 343–​74 (“Deep Hermeneutics of Complicity and Conversion: Inferno IX–​XVII”). 2  Douglas Hedley’s Living Forms of the Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2008) captures this presence of the transcendent especially in English lyric poetry. Hedley’s The Iconic Imagination (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) traces aesthetic expressions of divinity through Cambridge Platonists and Romantic poets, notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and displays the astonishing breadth of these cultural counter-​currents apprehending imagination as “a vehicle of Divine Revelation” (83).

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Paradiso and Secular Destiny of the West  267 immediately preceding Dante by the Troubadours, where the new valorization of an autonomous, self-​reflexive personality, defined not only by universal, rational desire but also by individual, subjective passion, emerges into distinctness. The religious inspiration of this new secular consciousness is still patent and far from extinct. Dante is becoming aware of human autonomy not as a curtailment of divine prerogatives and authority, but rather as their fulfillment. He is rediscovering human freedom in the concrete, historical sense in which it is a realization of infinite, self-​determining creativity. His work has proved to be a vital inspiration and compelling witness to this continuing power to emancipate individuals, even in the most oppressive conditions, through relation to a transcendent ideal.3 There has been a long-​standing debate between those, such as Erich Auerbach, who find in Dante the prophet of the modern, secular world, and those who, like Charles Singleton, insist on keeping Dante in his medieval context and thus resist the temptation to read Dante as our contemporary.4 But both angles of approach are necessary in order to fathom Dante’s creation in its awesome power to disclose our world poetically. Much of the Paradiso is taken up by Dante’s affirmation of his own historical existence. This is poignantly true in the autobiographical drama at its center in the Heaven of Mars (Cantos XIV–​XVIII). There Dante encounters his noble ancestor Cacciaguida, who nostalgically evokes a virtuous Florence of old. Still, Dante’s focus on himself does not eclipse divinity and its radical otherness. Quite the opposite. Dante’s own story is inscribed into salvation history and reflects the fact that, historically, the individual self is born in and through its relation to a transcendent divinity. This divine origin of the individual is progressively forgotten in the modern age. Nonetheless, the individual emerges together with transcendence discovered by self-​reflection, that is, by the ability of the self to transcend its world and “turn itself back upon itself”—​“sé in sé rigira”—​in the chiseled formula of Purgatorio XXV.75. This structure of self-​reflection traces back to the Axial Age: only much later does it tend to become the dead-​end of narcissistic self-​enclosure.5 Centering on the autobiographical disclosures of Dante’s encounter with his great great grandfather, the heroic martyr-​warrior Cacciaguida, in the 3  Such witness is borne diversely, but concretely, by Dennis Looney, Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011)  and Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 1958 [1947]), particularly the chapter “Il canto di Ulisse.” 4  Dante criticism has often remarked this tension: for example, Dante Della Terza, “La critica dantesca in America: la lezione singletoniana,” Letture Classensi 18 (1989): 131–​44. 5  On transcendence in the Axial Age, see Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012) and Chapter 8 (“Apophasis and the Axial Age: Transcendent Origins of Critical Consciousness”) of my On the Universality of What is Not, 201–​34. An analogy of Axial

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268  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation Heaven of Mars, the Paradiso unfolds an apotheosis of the self. But, at the same time, Paradiso is entirely consecrated to a vision of God. The self is discovered precisely as a mediation of God through such human encounters.6 In the Paradiso, the immediately concrete and subject-​centered world appears as but a mediation of an other world. Remarkably, in this respect, the medieval worldview agrees with the postmodern dismantling of the world order of the subject—​yet without any dogmatic rejection of the possibility of a true world elsewhere. Both medieval and postmodern (or post-​secular) worldviews are contrary to the typically modern secularist view, which tends to exclude God from the world forged by individual protagonism and human mastery. Dante’s discovery of the human world as all a mediation of an other world deconstructs this given world’s apparent concrete reality, but it opens a passage toward the possibility of a true reality, one that we can receive even as our possibility. The fact that anything “other-​worldly” likely rings false to modern ears should be heard as a warning siren signaling dogmatic bias and closure on our part. While the characteristic experience of the modern world, as proclaimed by its prophets Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, is rushing in the opposite direction, Dante’s discovery of the self and its autonomy or freedom is the locus of a new revelation of God. He begins to articulate this vision in a humanistic key with triumphalistic prose in his early works. The Convivio’s affirmation of human nobility as surpassing even that of angels recognizes man as “almost another incarnate god” (“quasi sarebbe un altro Iddio incarnato,” IV.xxi.10) and celebrates self-​love as the principle on which love of all else is based (“amando sé principalmente, e per sé l’altre cose,” IV.xxii.8). This paeon culminates in the concentrated theological lyricism of the Paradiso. The consummate theological poem is still based on these dynamics of self-​reflection. The great achievement of self-​reflexivity in the mystic experience of the Paradiso is the emergence of the self. Paradoxically, Dante derives his affirmation of autonomous human selfhood from his journey to the point of self-​annihilation in God. This point is also the origin of the self in the radical sense of subject-​transcendent selfhood. Only so can the self discover its radical grounding in transcendence.7 Dante’s mystical-​poetic ascent, accordingly, enacts a kind of transcendental deduction of the divine Ground of being. This is what brings together Dante’s mystic absorption Age transformations with changes in medieval society is drawn by Peter Brown, “Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change,” Daedalus 104/​2 (1975): 133–​55. 6  The compenetration of human encounter with theological revelation is argued programmatically by Vittorio Montemaggi, Reading Dante’s “Commedia as Theology: Divinity Realized in Human Encounter” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Matthew Rothaus Moser, Love Itself is Understanding: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of the Saints (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), sheds further light that makes metaphysical theology humanly manifest in the practice of prayer and charity by the saints. 7  This is demonstrated in detail by Christian Moevs, who describes salvation or “enlightenment” as an act of self-​reflexive, metaphysical self-​consciousness:

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Paradiso and Secular Destiny of the West  269 in God and his realistic, insistently autobiographical emphasis. Dante’s “transcendental deduction” of divinity from the possibility of human experience as self-​reflective has ultimately a poetic sense. This critical-​ poetic insight is in agreement with a deep-​flowing stream of metaphysical thought that can be traced through Eriugena and Neoplatonism to Eckhart and Scholasticism. These traditions lucidly declare the ultimate metaphysical Ground to be indefinable, unnamable, and unknowable. It can only be reflected—​as in a mirror—​and this is exactly what language does in Dante’s tradition of imagination.

Gay Science as Immediacy of Self-​Reflective Knowing The transcendence discovered through reflection is not a remote abstraction (the “God” often erroneously attributed to negative theology8) but rather immediacy itself. Phenomenologically, reflection proves capable of perceiving itself in its own act as immediate (sections 24, 31). Reflection then sees itself immediately in all that it sees. This engenders, in one telling instance, the giddy spirit of joy expressed in Troubadour song lyrically celebrating what is seen immediately all around one in springtime. Bertran del Born renders this universal topos as framed by the lyric “I”: Be.m platz lo gais temps de pascor, Que fai fuolhas e flors venir ; E plaatz mi, quan auch la baudor Dels ausels, que fan retentir Lor chan per lo boschatge … .9 (I love the joyful time of Easter, That makes the leaves and flowers come forth, And it pleases me to hear the mirth Of the birds, who make their song Resound through the woods … .) Bertran expresses this outbreak of immediate joy in life in the self-​ reflective artistic medium of the chant, in which the outer world reflects and expresses the poet’s inner self in its intrinsic mood. He then extends If, hypnotized by their spatio-​temporal form, humans experience themselves only as ephemeral bodies and identities, they are lost in eternal night and desire; if, following Christ, they turn their mind or awareness back on itself [italics added], surrendering all worldly attachment and greed (cupidigia), they can come to experience themselves as (one with) the reality that spawns all possible experience, immune to birth and death. (The Metaphysics of Dante’s “Comedy,” 6) 8  Denys Turner, Mystery and Mystification (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) critiques this misunderstanding. 9 Goldin, Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères, 242.

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270  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation this joy in nature to his own shocking jubilation in the destructiveness of war in a paeon that is worthy of Nietzschean gay science, itself calqued on medieval gaya scienza (bel sabor) and enfolding also an affirmation of war. Regardless of its contents, Bertran’s poem expresses an immediacy reached through self-​reflection. Not the content but the form of perception by reflection enacts the immediacy of revelation. Self-​reflection itself becomes the content, the immediate object of its own perception. Self-​reflection constitutes itself as immediate contact with an absolute reality—​or as intellectual knowledge, a knowledge of knowing itself (section 36). Such knowing does not pertain fundamentally to differentiated contents but rather to the enactment of knowing itself as a unitary act in which alone all differentiated reality comes to light. Poetry in Dante is a means of realizing this level of consciousness, not by abstraction from historical and sensorial contents, but by their subsumption and sublation into unifying cognition and cognizance of all in all. The mind experiences its own light in all that it experiences, and this experience of pure consciousness itself is the experience of God. Moevs has read Dante’s mystical metaphysic in this key and has documented its derivation especially from Aristotelian speculative traditions as reconfigured in Neoplatonic medieval terms. Dante discovers poetry as the privileged medium for this type of contemplation, which is boundless. Such self-​reflection of the mind on itself contemplates all of reality in its truth and essence—​because in its source. Poetic contemplation as a form of speculation through self-​reflection proves to be a prophetic revelation of the entire cosmos and historical world, in which all things are seen together in their oneness and are disclosed in their ultimate truth and beauty. This self-​reflective speculation of the real in the mirror of the mind ignited by love crystalizes the original impulses of lyric poetry. They are then disclosed in their furthest purport by Dante’s theological transposition and apotheosis of the original creative act of lyric self-​reflection performed by the Troubadours. Theology itself is broken open by this appropriation. Especially in Paradiso, theology emerges as no longer a dogmatic code confining sense perception so much as an imaginative resource deployed for envisioning absolute reality in its multifarious forms of expression. By contemplating its own act of mirroring the natural world in its immediacy, self-​reflection can reflect the unity of phenomena, since they are united in the mind, and this grants them also to be apprehended in their wholeness. The gay science of poetry, since its lyric inception, has promised and even sometimes delivered such wisdom. This point of view transcends all particular, content-​ bound and object-​ oriented perceptions, yet it can be represented only on their basis.10 The

10 This paradox and problematic is finely dissected in a post-​Hegelian horizon in De/​ Constituting Wholes: Towards Partiality Without Parts, ed. Manuele Gragnolati and Christoph F. E. Holzhey (Vienna/​Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2017).

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Paradiso and Secular Destiny of the West  271 Paradiso’s speculative self-​reflection belongs in a tradition stretching from ancient pre-​Socratic sources through medieval Scholasticism and continuing with Renaissance humanism and German idealism down to our own post-​secular times.11

11  Barry Sandywell’s three-​volume Logological Investigations (London: Routledge, 1996), beginning with Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason (vol. 1), treats the broad sweep of reflexivity in lyric since the Greeks. Volume 2, The Beginnings of European Theorizing: Reflexivity in the Archaic Age, considers epic and lyric reflexivities in Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and archaic Orphism, while volume 3 examines Pre-​socratic Reflexivity. This monumental project, however, leaves reflexivity in the turn to modern Romance literature largely unexamined.

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55  Language as Speculative Mirroring of the Whole of Being in the Word—​Gadamer

Dante’s use of mirrors to represent Paradise is founded on a speculative metaphysics that was honed to a fine art in the Middle Ages and has not ceased to fascinate thinkers down to Hegel and Gadamer. Dante presents God specularly, through an indispensable imagery of mirroring, yet this approach to God becomes fully intelligible, not only by the light of images, but also through the speculative character of language. God cannot properly be represented in an image, nor be understood in language, but language’s speculative structure can reflect the whole of beings. By expressing this totality, language approaches the envisioning of Being itself—​esse ipsum—​for many Scholastics the preeminent name for God, insofar as God is capable of being linguistically expressed at all. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics stresses how whatever can be understood to be anything is necessarily within language, indeed is language. According to Gadamer’s motto, “Being which can be understood is language” (“Sein das verstanden werden kann ist Sprache”).1 This makes language into a self-​enclosed world, and yet precisely this structure is what enables openness to the Other, the encounter with God, and a premonition of—​if not a passage to—​the outside of language. Mirroring in language enables total mediation of the inward by the outward because it totalizes the inward, which does not appear at all as such, in an image of the outward.2 This type of specular relation enables the infinite to be represented in a finite word. By reflecting on its own finiteness, an interpretive act in language can reflect itself as a delimitation of an infinite unsaid. Saying relates through its own determinate being, its situatedness, to an infinite unsaidness. Language, because of its specularity, can express more than what it says; it can “hold what is said together with an infinity of what is not said in one unified meaning” (Truth and Method, 469). This enables interpretation to “see through the 1  Hans-​Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J. C.  B. Mohr, 1960), 478, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.  Marshall as Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). 2  Cf. Hegel, Enzyclopedie (1830), sec. 140: “that which is only inner can only be outer” (“das, was nur innerlich ist, nur äußerlich sein kann”).

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Language as Speculative Mirroring  273 dogmatism of a ‘meaning-​in-​itself’ ” (473). Every meaning depends on a larger context. Thinking speculatively means not taking objects of thought as just positively given, but rather reflecting on the way in which they present themselves as they do for the thinker. The whole of what is thinkable can be placed under this condition. As Hegel argues in the Introduction to the Phenomenology, even the so-​called thing-​in-​itself is in-​itself for consciousness, since it is consciousness or thinking which thinks this very distinction. This negation of the purely objective mediates the relation of thought to all that it can think about and enables the thinkable to be thought as a whole. Hegel and hermeneutics are heirs of Vico in precisely this respect. The in-​itself per se is infinite and impossible to apprehend, but when it is brought under the concept of being thought by consciousness as in-​itself, it has a certain determinateness that first makes it graspable in a concrete sense even in its infinity. Only through the determinateness of the finite can the infinite be determinately conceived. Similarly, in the speculative proposition, the subject term is not posited in itself in its own discrete meaning in order then to be joined with an independently definable predicate. Instead, the true subject comes out only through the predicate, and vice versa. This is “the dialectical movement of the proposition itself” (“die dialektische Bewegung des Satzes selbst”), what Hegel calls “the really speculative” (“das wirklich Spekulative”).3 This achieves what Gadamer in turn calls the “dialectical self-​destruction of the proposition” (Truth and Method, 467). The dialectical movement of the proposition expresses the speculative relation—​ the mirror-​ like relation—​ that is language’s speculative presentation of the thing itself. To say that language is speculative means that it and its object are aboriginally for one another: they are not posited as existing independently. One is always within the relation and inter-​determination of language and things whenever one tries to talk about either language or things. Given this predicament, it is not possible to talk objectively, but only speculatively, about whatever (like God) is not finite. Taking the speculative dialectic of thought and the concept developed by Hegel into the realm of language, Gadamer speaks of a speculative dimension belonging to language as such, according to which “the finite possibilities of the word are oriented toward the sense intended as toward the infinite” (469). What an utterance specularly mirrors is not just itself but the whole of language and indeed the whole of being that is presented in language. Accordingly, “Someone who speaks is behaving speculatively when his words do not reflect beings, but express a relation to the whole of being” (469). This possibility is based on a logic of self-​negation that lies at the very root of linguistic significance. It has been worked out 3 G. W.  F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 61.

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274  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation contra Gadamer in terms of the thought of difference by Derrida. It was thought through previously by Hegel in his doctrine of the speculative concept or proposition. And yet, “What he [Hegel] calls dialectic and what Plato called dialectic depends, in fact, on subordinating language to the ‘statement’ ” (Truth and Method, 468). This is why the linguistic turn in philosophy, especially with Heidegger, points us back to a moment before modern positivisms and in the direction of Dante’s inextricably linguistic understanding of everything, his “pansemiosis.” The Paradiso’s speculative reflecting of the whole of being is effected by poetic language, particularly by dint of metaphor, and thus self-​reflection in this sense also turns toward the Other, toward references other than those literally signified. Language works to effect a totality: it makes possible the totality that Dante realizes in the aesthetic system of his Commedia. Language is the image of God in which all that is unpacked and laid out through the universe is contained, as if bound by love in a single volume (“legato con amore in un volume,” XXXIII.85–​87). Hegel’s philosophy is a culmination of self-​reflexive thinking based on Christian revelation. The divine is fully and finally revealed in Jesus Christ—​in divinity reflected in human being taken to its perfection. This divine-​human self-​recognition is the goal of spirit (Geist) throughout its evolution. However, since Hegel’s time, we have come to expect and prize something else more than this completed closure of self-​reflection. Kierkegaard, in the wake of Hegel, called passionately for recognition of something irreducibly Other that remains indefinable in our experience of the Absolute. And he has been followed in this insistence by a numerous progeny of postmodern heirs. Yet just such recognition was already unmistakably built into Dante’s way of thinking and existing as oriented to a transcendent God. Mirror images totalize worlds and thereby symbolize eternity. The mirror reflection in visual arts since the Renaissance has been a mechanism for rupturing the frame and opening represented space up to what it does not encompass4—​to the outside in relation to which whatever is represented exists. Emblematic here is Diego Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas (1656), with its depiction of the painter painting and its inset mirror reflecting what stands outside and surrounds the painting, including the Spanish sovereigns. By means of such self-​reflection, the givens of the senses are made into a whole. Dante, like Augustine before him and like Hegel after, is not yet willing to settle for truth that is less than the whole.5

4  Marta Ruiz del Àrbol, Reflejos: De Van Eyck a Magritte (Museo Thyssen, Bornemisza: Miradas cruzadas 6, 2013). 5  Edward Booth, O. P., St. Augustine and the Western Tradition of Self-​Knowing (Villanova: Villanova University Press, 1989)—​or in a condensed version “Hegel’s Conception of Self-​Knowledge Seen in Conjunction with Augustine’s,” Augustiniana 30 (1980): 221–​50.

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Language as Speculative Mirroring  275 In the seventh heaven, Beatrice tells Dante to use his eyes as mirrors (“specchi”) for seeing into the heavenly sphere as itself a mirror (XXI.16–​ 17). In the Empyrean, Dante “makes mirrors of his eyes” in order to see not himself but the blessed in their eternity (XXX.85). To do so, he drinks with his eyelids of the river of light, which metamorphoses from straight to round as his perspective switches from temporal to eternal (88–​90). What Dante’s eyes mirror is finally not himself, nor even his own temporal world, but his source in a wholly other, an eternal world. Already in the Earthly Paradise, Dante saw not himself but the gryphon representing Christ’s two natures mirrored in Beatrice’s eyes (Purgatorio XXXI.106–​26). Cusanus, in his sublimely mystical treatise De visione Dei, formulates this essential insight philosophically: “in the mirror of eternity we see not our own image, but the truth of which our seeing is itself an image” (“quod videt in illo aeternitatis speculo, non est figura, sed veritas, cuius ipse videns est figura,” 15.63).

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56  From Philosophical Idealism to Linguistic Ontology

Dante carries out his radically existential revelation even while remaining faithful to a certain idealism of the mind. In the Vita nuova, he designates Beatrice as “the glorious lady of my mind” (“la gloriosa donna della mia mente,” II.1), and in the Paradiso the “mind in love” (“la mente innamorata”) lingers longingly (“donnea”) on her, seeking her with its eyes: La mente inamorata, che donnea   con la mia donna sempre, di ridure   ad essa gli occhi più che mai ardea … .         (XXVII.88–​ 89)

(The mind in love which lingers longingly   on my lady always, more than ever burned   to turn eyes on her) … . Although this philosophical idealism is strongest in Dante’s treatises, notably the Convivio,1 we see here that it remains an aspect of his thinking through to his journey’s height. Dante’s “minor” works foreshadow a conception of philosophy that anticipates the entire trajectory of modern thought with its totalizing metaphysical drives and directives that culminate in Hegel. However, the crucial difference is that, for Dante, the closure that counts is not achieved within a philosophical system and in a determinate language, but only in a poetic reaching out toward the ineffable “beyond” of language. Everything depends on whether the whole that is mirrored in language is itself a complete statement formulated in language or rather opens to embrace what is beyond language and leaves language gaping open to what it cannot comprehend—​to a whole to which language and thought belong, but which they cannot encompass and control.2 Rather 1  John Took, Dante: Lyric Poet and Philosopher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 98–​105. 2  It is possible to turn the interpretation of Hegel around dialectically and read him, too, as ambiguously orienting philosophy to this gaping void. Andrew W. Hass does this in

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Philosophical Idealism—Linguistic Ontology  277 than identifying revelation with an articulated truth, Dante concludes, in the final sentence of the Convivio, that the perfection of wisdom of which Lady Philosophy is the friend dwells in the deepest secret of the divine Mind (“nel secretissimo della divina mente”). He thereby turns philosophical idealism into an open, existential relation to the Infinite and so anticipates the Paradiso’s obsessive turning toward the ineffable. Admittedly, Dante’s theoretical pronouncements on language do not consistently support as radical a view of language as comes to be embodied in his poetry, especially as we are able to understand it in light of posterior developments centuries later. Dante writes, for example, in De vulgari eloquentia I.ii.3, that speech is “nothing but the communication of our thought to others” (“nichil aliud quam nostre mentis enucleare aliis conceptum”), and this, too, is evidently in some sense true. However, it is rather in the linguistic and poetic theory actually realized in his poetry that Dante unveils his profoundest understanding of language and its implications for his theological vision, no less than for his artistic experimentation. Dante’s poetry itself actually performs an act of thought that is fathomless in its insights and implications. Here I  have interpreted these implications with frequent reference to more recent thought about language. I  concede that I  am not exactly reconstructing Dante’s own understanding of what he was doing. Instead, I am bringing out the full significance of the creative use of language in Dante’s poetry as it may be appreciated retrospectively with the theoretical lenses and resources available to us today. The premise for such a reading is a conviction that the Paradiso is an attempt to experience the essence of language as the essence of being—​and even of the Supreme Being. To write, and by consequence to read, the Paradiso in this way is to “undergo an experience with language” (“mit der Sprache eine Erfahrung machen”), in Heidegger’s idiom from On the Way to Language.3 For both Dante and Heidegger, the question of language is the question of being: it entails the question of all beings in their originary ground and togetherness, their proleptic mutual relatedness in making up a world or cosmos. Language opens an ontological dimension through aesthetic and other types of experience by a subject.4

“Hegel and the Negation of the Apophatic,” Contemporary Debates in Philosophy and Negative Theology: Sounding the Unsayable, ed. Nahum Brown and J. Aaron Simmons (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), focusing on Hegel’s early poem “Eleusis” as seminal to his whole oeuvre. Nahum Brown’s contribution to this volume likewise proposes an apophatic re-​reading of Hegel. 3  Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), 159. 4  Warren Ginsberg, Dante’s Aesthetics of Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); John Took, Dante’s Phenomenology of Being (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 2000).

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57  Language as Revelation or Revealment

Language, the Word, is revelation. This holds for Heidegger and for Wilhelm von Humboldt because language by its nature is disclosure of a world. For Christian poets like Dante, it holds for yet a further reason. The word manifests and mirrors the real because the theological Word, which was in the beginning with God and which was God, creates the world (Gospel According to John 1:1–​3). In the Paradiso, Dante seeks to recover the essence of language as itself revelation of the divine Word. We should perhaps say that he highlights there this quest, since the whole Divine Comedy participates in the revelation of language. However, in the Paradiso in particular, Dante attenuates reference in the attempt to reveal the essential nature of language. The reference that is surpassed is reference in an ordinary sense, not reference to an indeterminate higher realm projected from sense. Superseded is empirical reference, but not signification as projection of meaning that is created by the word self-​ reflexively in the image of the divine Word. Dante employs empirical reference, but he uses it to refer to or to evoke another world beyond the range of the senses. Dante’s language has perfectly clear empirical sense, yet it also brackets this sense in order to indicate some other world beyond the range of ordinary sense and reference. This other space or domain is suggested and evoked self-​reflexively by language. Dante thereby anticipates modern symbolist poetics in which language itself becomes the ambit of an original experience of unprecedented reality that can be experienced only in and through the experience of the essence of language itself.1 What is, insofar as it can be spoken, comes to be in language. What Dante achieves is to show, in words of the later Heidegger, that “language speaks” (“die Sprache spricht”).2 He lets the saying that is intrinsic to language come forward in lyrical form. This saying is not what we say by means of language, but what it says, for language is itself a saying. It communicates something beyond what any of us use it to communicate. 1  Hans-​Jost Frey, Studien über das Reden der Dichter (Munich: Fink, 1986)  interprets symbolist poetics of Hölderlin, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé in this ontological register. 2  Heidegger, “Die Sprache,” Unterwegs zur Sprache.

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Language as Revelation or Revealment  279 This is to recognize the transcendence of the medium with respect to any of the messages it is made to bear. In Marshall McLuhan’s pithy dictum, “the medium is the message.”3 The medium is already in and of itself laden with significance that no one can command because it rather commands all that we can say in language. Language thus inaugurates our history and destiny in ways that Heidegger magisterially theorizes. We have to pay attention particularly to the limits of language in order to fathom its revelation of an invisible realm beyond the world. Heidegger’s thinking revolves around the concealment inherent in unconcealing, and in this he is anticipated by medieval thinking that focuses on the allegorical veil in order to contemplate what the veil keeps hidden and yet enables to be indicated as hidden and invisible.4

3  The catchphrase first occurs as the title of Chapter 1 of Understanding Media. 4 Boulnois, Au-​ delà de l’image (Beyond the Image) traces this dialectic in medieval tradition.

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58  Language as Disclosure in Lyric Time—​Heidegger, Heraclitus, and Unconcealment

Particularly the experience of language, then, and specifically of language as revealed by the reflexivity of the inner word, enables Dante to experience time as transcended. Dante discovers the essential origin of time—​ its “roots,” as Paradiso XXVII.118–​19 suggests with reference to the Primum Mobile—​as unconcealed in a dimension prior to the elapsing of time within worldly temporality. Language can recreate a temporality that is free from worldly time, which is linear, irreversible, and fallen. It thereby affords a glimpse of eternity. For that to happen, Dante’s use of language must be a means of letting language occur in its essence or, more specifically, manifest itself as divine λόγος (Logos), which is revealed as the underlying condition of all its merely human linguistic expressions. Language’s transcendence of its normal, pragmatic referential use is elicited particularly from its function of connecting and binding. In the Convivio, Dante defines the nature of poetic language as essentially a tying together of words (“legare parole,” IV.vi.3–​4). In De vulgari eloquentia II.i, Dante uses the rare words avieo, -​ere (“to bind”) and avientes (“binders”) for “writing poetry” and “poets” respectively. Heidegger’s discussion of Heraclitus’s Logos fragment (50) thinks through the nature of language as consisting in a verbal tying or binding (λέγειν) that discloses things through their relations. The Logos fragment, as Heidegger reads it, shows that unconcealment (“Unverborgenheit”) can occur only as the “laying together before” of things in ordered arrangement. It is because things are gathered together that they can be unconcealed—​ each element in relation to others forming whole structures of significance. This gathering is not itself historical. Yet it must be let happen in history and by human action in order actually to take place at all. Heidegger insists on how “this unifying which occurs in the λόγος remains infinitely different from what we tend to represent as a connecting or binding together.”1 It cannot be properly represented—​its unconcealing is constitutively concealed. Yet this “unifying-​gathering” 1 Martin Heidegger, “Logos Fragment” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 207–​29, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A.  Capuzzi in Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 59–​78. Citation, 71.

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Language as Disclosure in Lyric Time  281 of Logos is the pre-​condition of any historical happening. It operates a priori, prior to experience, like Vico’s ideal eternal history. The entering into a gathering that discloses time and everything temporal and historical takes place through a submitting to determination by history rather than by turning away from history toward eternal ideals. Dante’s poem, too, is remarkable for its showing of language as emergent in the temporal: it reveals itself, in the apt description of Philippe Sollers, as “a text in process of being written” (“un texte en train de s’écrire …”). Sollers grasps, furthermore, how this processual element of the poem’s language hangs together with its being bound and gathered in a totality that is not itself given in history, but which instead gives history its shape—​a totality that is best symbolized as a book. He designates the Divine Comedy as “the first great book thought and integrally enacted as a book by its author” (“le premier grand livre pensé et agi intégralement comme livre par son auteur”).2 The paradox here is that we, together with everything we make, must change and indeed perish in order to gesture toward the imperishable. As Saint Augustine perceived, our only permanence is in him without whom we are not, while he remaining the same as himself renews everything else (“si non manebo in illo, nec in me potero. Ille autem in /​se manens innovat omnia,” Confessiones VII. xi.17).3 Dante echoes this idea and language in Paradiso XVII.139 (“pur rimanendo in sé uno,” etc.). The creation of a self-​enclosed lyric time—​or rather (self-​encircling) eternity—​is the essential condition of the work of art—​the “origin of the work of art” (“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks”), to echo Heidegger’s equivocal title. Dante’s Divine Comedy is, in this respect, an apotheosis of the artwork. The idea of the artwork, and particularly of the poem, as defining a separate world and ordering time unto itself is widely represented and thought through in its speculative ramifications by the German Romantics. F. W. J. Schelling, in his Philosophie der Kunst, writes of the artwork as originating through severing the speech (“Absonderung der Rede”) of the artwork from the “totality of language” (“Totalität der Sprache”). The work’s own rhythmic lawfulness “has its time [or temporality] in itself” (“ihre Zeit in sich selbst hat”) and thus allows the work to have the separate “being-​in-​itself” (“in-​sich-​selbst-​sein”) that makes it an “autonomous whole” (“unabhängigen Ganzen”).4 We see this ideal of the self-​sufficient, autonomous work operating already in Dante. He defines the canzone as comprehending everything

2  Philippe Sollers, “Dante et la traversée de l’écriture,” Logiques (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 45. Sollers’s La Divine Comédie: entretiens avec Benoît Chantre (Paris: Desclée de Brower, 2000)  expands voluminously on this idea, while his Vers le Paradis (Paris: Desclée de Brower, 2010) condenses it to intensely personal “expérience.” 3  Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 4  F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960), 279ff.

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282  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation necessary for poetic art within itself (“in solis cantionibus ars tota comprehendatur,” De vulgari eloquentia II.iii.8). This condition stands as an image or imitation of God, who “measures himself with himself” (“sé con sé misura,” Paradiso XIX.51). This highest Good that has never changed from itself (“da sé, ch’è sommo Ben, mai non si mosse”) is “good in itself” (“da sé buono,” XIX.86–​87). The ideal of self-​related, self-​ engendering goodness and being governs the aesthetics and metaphysics of the Paradiso. In this respect, Dante is a faithful representative of a Christian theological ideal inherent in the very fabric of Christian, particularly Augustinian thinking about the entire Creation—​and eminently about the Incarnation. Yet, this “revelation” is at the same time a re-​veiling of the invisible God, whose completeness is concealed by anything finite. One thing that Heidegger shows with matchless penetration about language as unconcealment is that the unconcealing itself is always concealed and even conceals itself.5 Such an ambiguous valence can be discerned in the “veil of Isis” as expounded by exegetes from Plutarch of Athens to Friedrich Schiller. This is also Dante’s essential experience of language in the dialectic of veiling and unveiling—​in “re-​velation.” The Paradiso is about unconcealing concealment of the unsurpassable limit to revelation. The Divine Comedy’s ascent to revelation and unveiling climaxes in the Purgatorio, whereas the Paradiso turns back again to focus on language as a veil over what it ostensibly discloses. Its central (apophatic) preoccupation, as its declarations of ineffability attest, becomes the concealing wrought by language even in revelation.

Revelation and Re-​Veiling—From Purgatorio XXIX–​XXXIII to Paradiso The properly apocalyptic revelation of the Commedia comes not at the end of the Paradiso, and therewith of the poem, but rather at the end of the Purgatorio.6 Revelation, even final revelation, or revelation of the end, is not the ultimate stage of Dante’s journey. The Paradiso is more concerned with unrevealment than with ultimate and definitive revelation. Revelation is approached in the Paradiso in and through the failure of every attempt at revelation and disclosure—​which failure itself becomes a sort of second-​degree revelation or disclosure. In the end, there is something beyond revelation: the unrevealable that remains by its very

5  Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988), trans. Ted Sadler as The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus (New York: Continuum, 2002). 6 Peter Hawkins, “Augustine, Dante, and the Dialectic of Ineffability,” in Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), remarks that Scriptural allegory as apocalypse or “unveiling” ends here: “once the final apocalyptic scenes of the Purgatorio are behind us, Dante’s mimesis of Scripture seems to be complete” (214).

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Language as Disclosure in Lyric Time  283 nature unmanifest and that can be experienced only as escaping from the regime of revelation. It is experienced only through deification, in which one becomes what one cannot know objectively.7 By “transhumanizing” (I.70), Dante is metamorphosed through the action of light. Paradiso describes both descent from the Father of lights and ascent through progressive stages or intensities of light uniting the creature to its Source.8 Yet even light turns out to be a veil for metaphysical being, which is not as such perceptible.9 Dante is thus operating an allegorical or a symbolic (even practically symbolist) poetics, to the extent that he represents at all what his rhetoric of ineffability relentlessly insists cannot be properly represented. The program of an unveiling of truth in symbols comes to a climax in Purgatory, in the apocalyptic scenes shown to Dante and glossed by Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise. He receives detailed symbolic-​ apocalyptic revelations concerning the history of the Church and the world and their denouement. The Bible itself, as paradigmatic book of revelation, is presented in the form of allegorical figures (24 for the books of the Old Testament + 4 for the Gospels and 7 for the other books of the New Testament) paraded before Dante’s astonished eyes. Yet what is revealed turns out to be always itself just another veil. Each book of the Bible is dissimulated in the guise of an allegorical figure, while Beatrice herself appears veiled under so many layers of garments that she appears practically as her veils. She looms like a veiled sunrise: Io vidi già nel cominciar del giorno   la parte oriental tutta rosata,   e l’altro ciel di bel sereno addorno; e la faccia del sol nascere ombrata,   sì che per temperanza di vapori   l’occhio la sostenea lunga fiata: così dentro una nuvola di fiori   che da le mani angeliche saliva   e ricadeva in giù dentro e di fori, sovra candido vel cinta d’uliva   donna m’apparve, sotto verde manto   vestita di color di fiamma viva.

       (Purgatorio XXX.22–​33)

7  This movement is traced in detail by Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy,  57–​71. 8 Didier Ottaviani, La philosophie de la lumière chez Dante: Du Convivio à la Divine Comédie (Paris: Campion, 2004) focuses this thematic. 9  Marco Ariani, Lux inaccessibilis: Metafore e teologia della luce nel Paradiso di Dante (Rome: Aracne, 2010), especially section II: “Lux deificans,” recapitulates the immense Patristic and Scholastic tradition on which Dante builds.

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284  Self-Reflection, Speculation, Revelation (I have seen in the beginning of the day   the oriental part of the sky all rosy   and the rest adorned with beauty serene, and the face of the sun emerge shaded   such that the tempering of the vapors   allowed the eye to sustain it a long while: just so, within a cloud of flowers   that rose up from angelical hands   and fell back down within and without, on a white veil girt with olive   a woman appeared to me under a green mantle   dressed in the color of living flame.) What the culmination of the Purgatorio in these cantos (XXVIII–​ XXXIII) in the Earthly Paradise brings to realization is that revelation is always also a re-​veiling. Nevertheless, the Paradiso aims to go beyond this dialectic. The ultimate experience of the naked truth itself requires transcending the allegorical method toward a kind of degree-​zero of literature. Poetic allegory, even apocalyptic allegory, remains always a form of representation and never pure presence itself. In the Paradiso, Dante pushes to and past the limits of representation in his final efforts to realize the awareness of God that he has been seeking from the outset, and yet, even in Paradise, Dante recurs obsessively to the figure of Narcissus. In the Earthly Paradise, Dante sees himself in the river as in a mirror (“come specchio anco,” Purgatorio XXIX.67–​ 69). This motif is not definitively transcended but is rather transfigured. The myth of Narcissus is perhaps a veil that knowledge and especially self-​knowledge needs to keep wearing in order not to become completely void of express content. Dante considers the need for poetic veils in order to enjoy ineffable delights, and he blames Eve for having lost (or at least delayed) for him and for all other postlapsarian humans the delights of Paradise (“quelle ineffabili delizie”) by her not suffering to stay under any veil (“non sofferse di star sotto alcun velo,” Purgatorio XXIX.22–​30). The tutelage of veils turns out to be always necessary for teaching us the ultimate unrevealability of the divine even in ourselves. This limit is especially perspicuous in the essentially—​because textually—​veiled revelations of literature.10 In this sense, “revelation” re-​veils in the form of poetic allegory, but now the veil itself becomes the revelation—​a foretaste of Paradise. “The 10  Patricia Oster, Der Schleier im Text: Funktionsgeschichte eines Bildes für die neuzeitliche Erfahrung des Imaginären (Munich: Fink, 2002) demonstrates this limit for experience of “the imaginary” in a wide-​ranging cultural history that begins from Dante and passes through Petrarch, Tasso, Rousseau, and Goethe to Nerval and Proust.

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Language as Disclosure in Lyric Time  285 paradox, of course, is that it is this veil which makes the transmission of meaning—​the revelation—​possible.”11 The veil interrupts self-​reflection and breaks it open to reflection of the Other: the veil is unveiled as fundamentally the self-​reflective medium of language. The Earthly Paradise is distilled thereby into the form of a text, the experience of which can be blessedness itself—​the heavenly, purely spiritual Paradise, or the Paradiso experienced as poetry. The culmination of Purgatorio thus adumbrates what Paradiso shows more fully: in the Paradiso, myth will turn into real experience through the sense of song being fused with its sound and subsumed in a surpassing of the very form/​meaning dichotomy.

11 Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory, 9.  Akbari traces the ramifications of this paradox through medieval Latin and vernacular tradition as it leads up to Dante and Chaucer.

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PART V

Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus and the Spiritual Vocation of Poetry as an Exercise in Self-​Reflection

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59  Lyric Subjectivity and Narcissism—​ Totalization and Transcendence

As a founding myth of Western culture, from its main literary source in Ovid through numerous medieval elaborations to baroque, symbolist, and modern reworkings, the myth of Narcissus refracts operative interpretations of the psychological and even the ontological foundations of self and society. Narcissism is most often taken to be synonymous with a short-​circuiting of love misdirected not to the other, the beloved, but rather to an illusory image merely of oneself. This danger was marked with a particular stigma in the Middle Ages, when love was understood to be most deeply the love of God, the divine Other. The goal of human life conceived in Christian terms—​namely, to regain one’s original integrity by restoring the corrupted image of God in oneself—​is perverted into self-​love by a narcissistic turn toward this corrupt image itself rather than toward the pristine ideal revealed in Christ, the “last Adam” (I Corinthians 15:45). In this viciously circular orientation, the Narcissist remains fallen and even repeats the Fall all over again—​like Dante’s archetypal “Master Adam,” who in turn reproaches Sinon the Greek with desire “to lick the mirror of Narcissus” (“per leccar lo specchio di Narciso,” Inferno XXX.128). Hellishly athirst, he would require “few words of invitation” (“non vorresti a ’nvitar molte parole,” 129). Tellingly, Adam’s phrase connects this desire with words—​insinuating the narcissistic liabilities of language that the present argument enucleates. Dante’s emphasis falls on the instrumentality of language in Narcissus’s turning himself into an object as a mirror image whose reality nevertheless eludes him. Technological objectification (which begins with language) and narcissistic image gazing turn out to be two sides of the same corrupt coin in the counterfeiter of currency (Adam) and in the minter of mendacious discourse (Sinon). Both enact one side of the “ambiguity” elaborated at the core of Part IV (section 52). A number of fine analyses have long since evidenced in considerable detail how the lyric tradition of courtly love rehearses the essentials of the Narcissus myth.1 This deep investment begins with Troubadour 1  Distinguished older examples of this scholarship (before Goldin and Kristeva) include Jean Frappier, “Variations sur le thème du miroir, de Bernard de Ventadour à Maurice

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290  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus lyric, becoming accutely self-​conscious, for example, with Bernart de Ventadorn. The persona who speaks in Bernart’s poems declares himself lost ever since his beloved let him gaze into her eyes. For these eyes are a mirror showing him his own image, just as the fountain showed Narcissus his: Mirallis, pus me mirei en te, m’an mort li sospir de preon, c’aissi’m perdei com perdet se lo bels narcisus en la fon.

        (26.21–​ 24)

(Mirror, since I beheld myself, in you, the sighs from my depths have slain me, and I have lost myself, as fair Narcissus lost himself in the fountain.)

        (Goldin translation,  146)

The Nichols translation of stanza III of Bernart’s “Can vei la lauzeta mover” makes clearer the extent to which narcissistic self-​reflection opens into an uncontrolled space rather than fixing on and freezing a determinate image of self. Starting from the stanza’s first four lines: Anc non agui de me poder ni no fui meus de l’or’ en sai que*m laisset en sos olhs vezer en u miralh que mout me plai and continuing with the verses just given, Nichols renders the entire eight-​ line stanza as follows: Never have I been in control of myself or even belonged to myself from the hour she let me gaze into her eyes:—​that mirror which pleases me so greatly. Mirror, since I saw myself reflected in you, deep sighs have been killing me. I have destroyed myself just as the beautiful Narcissus destroyed himself in the fountain.2 The death in question has connotations of the mystic death that frees the soul into an unbounded life by destroying the limits of ego.3 Scève,” in Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 11 (1959): 134–​ 58 and Erich Köhler, “Narcisse, la fontaine d’Amour et Guillaume de Lorris,” Journal des Savants 2 (1963): 86–​103, who extends the analysis to subsequent courtly tradition. 2  The Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1962). 3 Alois Haas, “Mors mystica: Thanatologie der Mystik, insbesondere der deutschen Mystik,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 23/​3 (1976): 304–​92.

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Lyric Subjectivity and Narcissism  291 This lyric core is developed at length in the twelfth century in an Old French narrative poem, Narcisus,4 and in the 160 verses of Marie de France’s Le lais de Narcisse.5 But it finds in many respects its consummate treatment in the thirteenth century in Le Roman de la rose.6 The Fountain of Narcissus (“Fons d’Amors”) is the center of Guillaume de Lorris’s text and the animating source of the Garden, in which the quest transpires. L’Amant, wandering in quest of his ideal love through an idylic landscape, happens upon a fountain placed in a marble block. On the edge of it, he reads an inscription telling him that here died the beautiful Narcissus: Ou bout amont, lectres petites, Qui disoient que ci dessus Se mori li biaus Narcissus … .

        (vv. 1436–​ 38)

(At the upper end, in little letters Which said that in this place The beautiful Narcissus died.) After 68 verses (1439–​1507) summarizing the story of Narcissus, and after some trepidation on the part of the poet, the Lover looks into the fountain and sees two crystals interpretable allegorically as the eyes of his future beloved. The lover does not see himself or his own image in the stream, even though he is fully aware that this precisely is what happened to Narcissus—​ to the latter’s peril and ultimate perdition (“C’est li mirëors perilleus, /​Ou Narcisus li orguilleus /​Mira sa face et ses yex vers /​Dont il jut puis mors touz envers,” 1571–​74). Instead, the lover sees (symbolically) the eyes of his beloved, in which all the world is reflected for him in a unified, totalized, idealized image of his world—​in effect, the Garden. The world seen in the fountain as centered and unified is a narcissistic universe, a reflection of a unifying principle, which is the subject’s own self. Courtly love is quintessentially narcissistic by virtue of its totalizing devotion to one object, the ladylove, who enters the subject’s world, giving it a unified meaning and elevating all actions performed in her service by their single purpose. In fact, the lover is already in love before even seeing the rose. The Garden itself is an ideal order possible only on the basis of love—​the principle ideally ordering all by means of a unifying 4  Narcissus, Poème du XIIe siècle, ed. Pelan et Spence, 6th ed. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964). 5  Le lais de Narcisse, ed. Martine Thiry-​Stassin and Madeleine Tyssens, Bibliotèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’université de Liège, fasc. 211 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1976). 6  Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le roman de la rose (Paris: Garnier-​Flammarion, 1974).

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292  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus subjectivity. The beloved is simply a projection of such self-​reflecting, self-​ transcending passion. Given this structure, narcissistic self-​contemplation has a vector of transcendence built into it. The quest for ideal beauty in the shape of the beloved lady of lyric devotions is exposed as narcissistic in its basic motivations. The implications of vanity and death are clearly stated in a note of moral admonition. But, at the same time, narcissism is elevated to an ideal plane of lyric—​if not sexual—​fecundity and is revealed in its capacity to refine the soul in its directedness, via self-​reflection, toward an ideal that transcends it. The fountain is indescribably beautiful and its water always fresh and new (“L’iaue est tousdis fresche et novele”), in fact, perpetual and inexhaustible (“Ne que l’iaue ne puet tarir,” 1597).

Lyric Poetics and Psychoanalytical Subjectification The Narcissus thematics of the Roman de la rose reflect upon its lyric poetics and disclose parallel structures of self-​reflexivity. An allegorical narrative, with its promise of a delayed senifiance, conventionally surrounds the courtly lyric enterprise in order to contain the undisciplined lyric impulse to immediacy, which is considered dangerous. This typically entails a moralizing reading, in which self-​reflection is to be curbed and overcome. According to Akbari, [T]‌he narrator’s increasingly accurate understanding of the meaning of his dream is precisely what causes the narrative to come to an abrupt end. The narrator gradually comes to realize that he, as the lover in the dream, and as the courtly lover in real life, reenacts the experience of Narcissus. (Seeing through the Veil, 51) There is, however, also another valence of self-​reflection to be teased out of this type-​scene. The lyric landscape of the Garden or vergier is “all enclosed”—​just like the poem, in which the art of loving is “tout enclose.” Yet this self-​encompassing landscape is actually an idealized image of the Lover. The world of the Garden is a reflection of narcissistic subjectivity: the whole world perceived through one’s own love becomes a reflection of oneself. It is through the unified, totalized image of the world as it is mirrored in the water that a unified subjectivity can be constituted in the first place. According to Jacques Lacan, the idea of a unified world results from the unified image that the child first sees of itself at the mirror stage.7 Before this, the babe is only an incoherent mass of disparate, mutually contradictory impulses. As in psychology, so analogously in literature, it is through reflexivity that the “I” is constituted. Freud views narcissism 7 Jacques Lacan, “Le stade du mirroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je,” Revue française de psychanalyse 13 (1949): 449–​55.

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Lyric Subjectivity and Narcissism  293 as a primordial structuration of the libido: it is “the primal condition in which object-​libido and ego-​libido cannot be distinguished.”8 Narcissism contains the potential for both fatal perversion and ideal perfection. Freud helps us to understand how all courtly love is narcissistic. For Freud, sexual over-​estimation of the beloved woman—​as in the hyperbolic style of superlative “praise” that Dante adopts in Vita nuova XVIII–​XIX—​is a sure indication of narcissistic springs of affective attachment. The courtly lover-​poet abandons his narcissism only to reproduce it as projected onto the woman. Hence the celebration of the incomparability and uniqueness of an essentially arbitrary selection of one rose chosen from a myriad in the Roman de la rose. It does not matter which object is chosen so long as it serves for the projection of narcissism, which precedes object choice. This indifference of the object can likewise explain Troubadour Jaufré Rudel’s falling in love at a distance with the countess of Tripoli. And has not Dante said as much in equating love simply with having a noble heart (“Amor e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa, /​sì come il saggio in suo dittare pone,” Vita nuova, XX.3) in his adaptation of the founding principle of Guinizzelian stilnovism? Narcissism in its essential structure is objectless. If you take the self as an object, it becomes just like any other object and can no longer be infinite and the principle centering the world. Narcissism is not object-​ love it all. It is rather the cathexis of an ego ideal. Lyric, too, is essentially objectless, as we have emphasized in studying its Troubadour origins; it consists in a projective recreation of a world after the image of an ideal. In these lyric optics, language is specular, projecting a world by mirroring infinity (section 56). The lyric mode asks to be read as the linguistic equivalent of what narcissism is in the sphere of affective psychology.9 Narcissism, in this sense, consists not simply in a choice of self over other or over the external world as object. Instead, it entails a certain structuration of the world, namely, as a unified, idealized totality: “all being” (“toste l’estre”) in the Roman de la rose (line 1561). In this case, the self is not in the world but is rather coextensive with it as its ordering and transforming principle. Courtly love constitutes an absolutizing of the subject—​it requires total self-​possession for total devotion and subjection to an ideal. This willing subjection is what enables “subjectification.” In the classic lyric poem, the animating principle is the lyric “I” as unity of consciousness. The poem does not have to be about the “I.” No 8 Freud, “Die Physchologie des Narcißmus” (1914), trans. as On Narcissism: An Introduction in The Standard Edition of the Complete Pyschological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 73–​102. 9 Rouben C.  Cholakian, Troubadour Lyric: A Psychocritical Reading (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), x, maintains that especially medieval lyric, with its dramatized interiority and subsemantic subtexts, calls for such a psychoanalytic reading.

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294  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus “I” as such appears, for example, in a purely descriptive, anonymous Japanese haiku, or in Ezra Pound’s The apparition of these faces in the crowd Petals on a wet black bough, or in William Carlos Williams’s so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.10 Nevertheless, the unity of the poem is none other than the unity of the vision and language of a speaker, and this projects a unity of consciousness. Narcissism, in the broad sense of self-​reflexivity, is a necessary and universal structure of any coherent world. A world is inherently the world of a subject. Lyric projects a self-​enclosed, totalized, ideal world without confronting anything outside itself because it is fundamentally a non-​referential use of language. Its world is specularly projected rather than referentially denoted. To some extent, all language works this way, as Part IV of this book undertook to demonstrate. Lyric language most intensely shows this tendency inherent in language generally toward self-​enclosure—​but also simultaneously toward self-​exposure and ultimately explosion of its own self-​made frame as surpassed by the ideal it projects. Dante’s Paradise formed as a “candida rosa” (“white rose”) of blessed souls mirroring the light of God is all a thematic expression, on the grandest scale, of the self-​ transcending reflexivity of the language that enables Dante to reflect his ineffable experience of Paradise.

From Lyric Idealization to Epic Spiritual Journey of Self-​Perfection When the protagonist lover, Amant, in the Roman de la Rose looks into the Fountain of Narcissus, he does not in fact see anything recognizable as his own image: he sees, instead, an idealized, unified image of the Garden. To be sure, the world of the Garden itself reads as a narcissistic 10  Copyright©1962 by William Carlos Williams. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

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Lyric Subjectivity and Narcissism  295 projection, a correlative image of the self-​reflexive subject. But it idealizes and ennobles and universalizes the self—​and thereby becomes a stimulus for growth, as is appropriate to the garden setting. The inherent narcissism of courtly love is evident early on in the tradition, for example, in Bernart de Ventadorn’s seeing himself in his lady’s eyes. Contemplation of this ideal beauty and unapproachable Other is really a form of contemplating himself as exalted by this relation. Yet, because the image the courtly lover sees in his mistress’s eyes is an idealized image of himself, it inspires him to transcend his own present state and its inadequacy. To this extent, the courtly quest dovetails, and may even coincide, with Christian spiritual journeys of self-​perfection. In line with Genesis, Augustine’s teaching on the vestigia in De trinitate had suggested that our own image seen within ourselves, more deeply considered, is an image of God.11 This image contains a call to become what we truly are. What is most proper to humans is the image of God in them. In his Sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard repeatedly recurs to the likeness (iam in aliquo similes) between the soul’s self-​knowledge and its knowledge of God.12 Consonantly, Dante’s final vision of God reveals to him “our effigy” (“la nostra effige,” XXXIII. 131). This is why idealizing, dynamic self-​reflection does not stop with self-​enclosure and fixation (and thus symbolically death, as in the Ovidian myth) but carries over into transcendence toward God. Dante deploys this pattern of reflection of self into a higher ideal in innumerable instances and, in fact, as the structural pattern for the Paradiso as a whole. This final work is the culmination of a trajectory that can be traced from the Vita nuova through the Convivio’s aspiration to human perfection in the contemplative knowing of God. Definitively in the Paradiso, self-​reflexive courtly loving drives the intellect with its Platonic eros toward a higher, feminized version of itself. Dante never lets go of the initial erotic impulses that awaken him to love and propel him forward—​enticed by the irresistible beauty of Beatrice—​all the way to the vision of God. Tristan Kay outlines this trajectory by contrasting Dante with contemporary lyric poets, notably Guittone d’Arezzo and Guido Cavalcanti, whose spiritual quests require them, in contrast, to renounce erotic love. Kay studies Dante’s redemptive program of lyric against the background of tensions over several centuries between sensual and spiritual love in secular and Christian discourses, which both feed into Dante’s original synthesis.13 For Kay, Dante’s Vita nuova “proposes a new, boldly integrative solution to the moral tension at the heart of the lyric tradition. Its 11  Goldin draws out this connection in the Epilogue to The Mirror of Narcissus. 12  Étienne Gilson, L’Esprit de la philosophie médiéval (Paris: Vrin, 1987 [1932]), Chapter XI, examines doctrines of Bernard de Clairvaux, Aquinas, and others on self-​knowledge and its inherent dynamic of transcendence. 13 Kay, Dante’s Lyric Redemption: Eros, Salvation, Vernacular Tradition.

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296  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus mode of conversion transcends, rather than reinforces, a dualistic lyric paradigm whereby the poet must choose between his beloved and God” (31). This conversion to a transcendence integrating the spiritual and the sensual is accentuated to its acme in the Paradiso. Further articulating this transcendence of dichotomous logics, Moevs demonstrates philosophically the illusoriness of any dualistic subject-​ object optics in the Commedia’s metaphysical outlook.14 Heather Webb, concordantly, pushes Dante’s experience of the other person in Beatrice to the limit where it coalesces with experience of the divine.15 At the deeper source of love, there is no discernible difference between the beloved and God. Self-​reflection and its avatar in the erotic relation are the powerful means Dante employs in his pursuit of the Absolute. Self and beloved Other are eventually unveiled as equally illusory reflective reductions or mirages of an indivisible absoluteness of Love.

14  Moevs’s condenses and focuses his teaching on this theme in “Dante: Knowing Oneself, Knowing God,” in Dante, Mercy, and the Beauty of the Human Person, ed. Leonard J. DeLorenzo and Vittorio Montemaggi (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2017), 65–​80. 15 Heather Webb, Dante’s Persons: An Ethics of the Transhuman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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60  Narcissus Redeemed—​Positive Precedents from Plotinus

Dante’s program of redeeming Narcissus is not without powerful precedents for a positive valuation of narcissistic love particularly in Neoplatonic tradition. Julia Kristeva elucidates Plotinus’s “magisterial synthesis” of narcissistic autoerotic love of one’s own image with the Platonic quest for ideal beauty.1 Plotinus, in effect, transforms Platonic ideality into speculative interiority. Loving the ideal image of oneself contemplated interiorly, as opposed to a doting fascination with exterior beauty, is integral to Plotinus’s ascent of the mind to the One. This latter is “the object of love, love itself, and love of itself,” in Plotinus’s language insisting on the self-​love theme. Lovable, very love, the Supreme is also self-​love in that He is lovely no otherwise than from Himself and in Himself. Self-​presence can hold only in the identity of associated with associating; since, in the Supreme, associated and associating are one, seeker and sought one—​the sought serving as Hypostasis and substrate of the seeker—​ once more God’s being and his seeking are identical: once more, then, the Supreme is the self-​producing, sovereign of Himself, not coming to be as some external willed but existing as He wills it.2 Plotinus’s statements portray the One as a perfectly narcissistic lover: “Thus the Supreme can derive neither its being nor the quality of its being. God Himself, therefore, is what He is, self-​related, self-​tending …” (Enneads VI.viii.17). Plotinus even alludes to the Narcissus myth3—​not by name but by reference to the fable of the man who desired to sieze his own beautiful image in the water (Enneads I.vi.8). Although generally the attachment to images as such issues in a dispersion of self, the image can

1 Kristeva, Histoires d’amour, section on “Plotin, ou la théorie du reflet et de l’ombre: une intériorité,” 134–​39. 2 Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (Burdett, NY: Larson, 1992), VI.viii.15. 3 These allusions are sifted searchingly by Pierre Hadot, “Le mythe de Narcisse et son interprétation par Plotin,” Nouvelle Revue de Pyschanalyse 13 (1976): 81–​108.

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298  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus also be used to orient the self to the ideal and one and thereby turn the self back toward oneness within itself. The divine self-​relatedness entails that the human quest for wisdom, too, must turn self-​referentially inward: Seeking Him, seek nothing of Him outside; within is to be sought what follows upon Him; Himself do not attempt. He is, Himself, that outer, He the encompassment and measure of all things; or rather He is within, at the innermost depth; the outer, circling round Him, so to speak, and wholly dependent upon Him, is Reason-​Principle and Intellectual-​Principle. (Enneads VI.viii.18) The seeker imitates the same self-​sufficient self-​relatedness of the divinity that is sought: “The Sage, then, … is already set, not merely in regard to exterior things but also within himself, towards what is one and at rest: all his faculty and life are inward-​bent” (Enneads III.viii.6). The same becomes another same, one for one (monos pros monon). The autoeroticism of one’s own idealized image is implicit in the whole course of the quest for the divine in Western literature as a return to origin, to the true self and the same. Kristeva finds invested in this myth the very invention and opening of the interior space of subjectivity by the Neoplatonic turn in Greek philosophy. Thence it passes through Christian interpretations, in which the inner space of reflexivity and subjectivity becomes incarnate. Bodily pulsions are integrated into the ideality of this speculative love, as we follow its evolution to the subtle contradictions of the psyche probed by Freud and by psychoanalysis in his wake. Dante’s reversal of Narcissus’s error in Paradiso III.16–​21 puts us on guard against underestimating the power of images for mediating and revealing the real world. Even what appear to be images in Paradise are, more deeply considered, real substances (“vere sustanze”), and in fact we always need to understand images on the basis of the realities in which they are grounded (sections 43–​44). Quite generally, poets’ intimate sources of inspiration are reflectively projected as some form of Other. Beatrice, the image of beauty that inspires Dante, is his Other par excellence. Aesthetic narcissism produces a religious devotion to alterity.4 Narcissism, in Kristeva’s analysis, is recognized as a necessary foundation for art and religion (section 40). Such interpretations of his depth psychology notwithstanding, Narcissus, according to the surface sense of his narrative, is tragically isolated and condemned to death, a melancholy and pathetic personage.

4 Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Literature and Religion: The Error of Narcissus,” Religion & Literature 41/​2 (2009): 29–​35 demonstrates the inseparability of aesthetic and religious impulses for Dante.

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Narcissus Redeemed  299 And yet tradition has not failed to imagine his redemption.5 He may even point the way to salvation, as realized through lyric poetry. In fact, Narcissus opens up the world of imagination as mirroring one’s own reality, the sphere of phantasy, of speculative fiction. He opens a new horizon for subjectivity. His very suffering for love becomes redemptive—​ as already in courtly lyric from the Troubadours through the Sicilians and beyond. The suffering of the self opens it toward otherness. Marsyas, the satyr flayed of his skin or “vagina” (I.19–​21) by Apollo, serves as surrogate for Dante invoking Apollonian inspiration in a sort of rebirthing to divinity. Martyrdom can be a primary, indispensable mode of engendering openness to the Other. This struggle of the self develops in a distinctive way in Western tradition, the way of subjectivity, and it finds its most representative expression in the lyric. The self-​sufficiency of the perfect artifact, its “resting in itself,” is shown by Dante to be a form of prayer, an opening to what is beyond verbal structure: its Other is evoked and called upon by the verbal fixing of limits. This dialectical logic is known classically as “coincidentia oppositorum” and was developed eminently by John Scott Eriugena before being made proverbial by Nicholas of Cusa. The paradigm of self-​ reflection, understood through such a logic, has widespread influence throughout Western tradition.6 The most important lesson of Dante’s Paradiso for our purposes is that self-​reflexivity paradoxically renders possible an orientation outward toward the radically Other—​and this means, finally, an orientation also “upward” toward a divine Source—​or “downward” toward a divine Ground. Generalizing from what has been discovered at work intensively and paradigmatically in the Paradiso, we might say: “it seems to be precisely in the presence of the most effective stratagems of reflexivity that we see literature most clearly and diligently engaged in its fundamental business of being about something other than itself.”7 Edward Nolan’s meditations on the meaning of Paul’s “seeing through a glass darkly” (per speculum in aenigmate, I  Corinthians 13:12) emphasize that [I]‌t is precisely at this juncture [between subject and object, knower and known, Creator and creature], where we come to the absolute end of ourselves and touch the beginning of the radically Other, that 5  Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century (Lund: Gleerups, 1967) and Liebe Spaas, ed., Echoes of Narcissus (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000) survey this vast tradition and its widely diverging optics. André Green, Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort (Paris: Minuit 1983) analyzes its positive and negative spins. 6  Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) offers one reliable witness. 7 Edward Peter Nolan, Now through a Glass Darkly: Specular Images of Being and Knowing from Virgil to Chaucer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 10.

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300  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus language signals its fundamental limitation, its inevitable and final inability to bring us to the object of our desire. (20) The compatibility and indeed inseparability of self-​reflection and devotion to the Other is ingrained in the wisdom of the poetic and noetic tradition that Dante assembles and carries to its culmination at the intellectual summit of the Middle Ages. Chaucer’s work still basks in reflected rays of glory lingering over the sunset of this age of medieval culture oriented to a theological Absolute.8 There is, however, also a dark side to this glorious synthesis: a surreptitious undermining of the ideal is paradoxically necessary to its realization.

8  I pry open this angle of vision in “ ‘Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees’: Truth and Poetry in Chaucer as Compared with Dante,” The Chaucer Review 87/​1 (1999): 87–​106, reworked in Secular Scriptures, Chapter 2, 43–69.

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61  Lyric Self-​Reflection and the Subversion of the Proper

The return to self is a necessity of all knowledge. Even the movement of being itself, in the Neoplatonic conception, is a going out or emanation (strophe) from the One followed up by a return (epistrophe) back to the One. In Dante’s cultural heritage, this schema of “procession and return” is the other major paradigm, alongside the Trinity, that figures reality from its source and origin as essentially dynamic self-​reflection—​a going out from and then a returning to oneself again. All life and reality, from their highest instance, are governed by this structure. Odysseus’s nostos or return home was read allegorically in the Hellenistic world as a figure for the journey of the soul departing from and returning back to itself like a reflected ray of light. This Greek myth, as a quest to return to the fatherland, contrasts typologically with the narcissist’s speculative turning in upon self. Yet, in its Latin transmogrification, the myth’s protagonist becomes himself a sort of narcissist full of deceit. Virgil’s “Ulysses” masterminds the deception of the wooden horse bringing about the fall of Troy (Aeneid II). Ovid’s Ulysses’s employs crafty rhetoric to defraud Ajax of Achilles’s armor, provoking the great hero’s suicide (Metamorphoses XIII). This scheming trickster is no longer the archetype of return home to the fatherland: Dante damns Ulysses for leaving father, son, and wife behind in his “mad flight” (“folle volo,”) and rhetorically fabricating a false transcendence (Inferno XXVI.125).1 Dante’s Ulysses is a speculative narcissist like Dante himself, but an unrepentant—​ and finally a fraudulent—​ one who misses the mark of true transcendence because he lacks the divine grace that saves Dante (Purgatorio I.130–​33) and reconciles this form of speculative narcissism with return to the Father. Reflection is required to penetrate the deeper sense of these myths. Contra epic teleology, in lyrical song all reality becomes—​or is revealed as—​reflection and even self-​reflection. There is no stable goal or freestanding object, but rather a circle of self-​referentiality. This reflective

1 See Franke, The Revelation of Imagination, 355-​ 59, on “Discursive Traps: False Transcendence and Bad Faith.”

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302  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus self-​constitution of the real takes place through what Catherine Pickstock analyzes as “non-​identical repetition.” The Trinity is an archetype for this quasi-​circularity, and lyrical language is its preeminent mode of expression. Such non-​identical or supra-​identical sameness is subversive of the proper in the sense of anchorage to an extra-​linguistic referent. The subject, the lyric “I,” from this point of view, is just another object that gives way in a general assault on objective being. By ungrounding language in this way, lyric can become a subversive force—​contrary to the sense assigned it by Mikhail Bakhtin, who attacks lyric for being inherently reactionary (section 49). Self-​reflexivity forms the basis of a metaphysical dynamism in which identity is actively synthesized rather than imposed as objectively given. These aspects of self-​reflection belong to any complete picture of lyric: they form a counterweight to some of its other, more conservative connotations. The lyric subverts the epic and its linear genealogies and etymologies by substituting in their place an economy of signs, with its infinite series of metaphorical substitutions.2 Sociologically backgrounding this substitution is the shift from an economy based on real property, particularly land and livestock, to an exchange economy fostered by the rise of a banking system and the use of currency. The modern lyric involves construction of a self-​referential system of signs structured by binary oppositions—​joy/​pain, singing/​silence, hope/​despair—​in which meaning is always differential. It is, moreover, always metaphorical and never proper. Such meaning consists in a relay always to other signs—​without anchoring reference to anything extra-​linguistic. This circular self-​referentiality is read by many following Bloch as subversive, for it obscures reference:3 it breaks links with the world and with the word’s own etymological origins or proper sense. Bloch emphasizes the repercussions on aristocratic genealogy: Thus romantic love, as it was invented in the 12th century, introduces a potential obliqueness of family line that remains intimately tied to the process of linguistic deflection. Rhetoric … the art of poetry, constitutes, in fact, the map of such potential digressions. (131) The poetic figure mobilizes language’s playful potential, destabilizing fixed and proper meaning. This instability is fully registered in the Leys d’Amors (1328–​38), Guilhem Molinier’s treatise prescribing stylistic codes and grammatical norms for adjudicating Provençal poetry contests. Disruptive marriages between rhetorical terms and figures such as Barbarism and Solecism, the sister of Diction, or Schematism, etc., 2  R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 109–​27. 3  John M. Flyer, Language and the Declining World in Dante, Chaucer, and Jean de Meun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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Lyric Self-Reflection and Subversion  303 give rise to monstrous offspring. The dynamic mobility of poetic language threatens the straightness, orthodoxy, rectitude, and regularity of language. This is felt acutely also in Alanus de Insulis’s De planctu Naturae, which associates poetry with perversion and particularly with sexual deviation. Natura complains (in metrum primum) against the sodomite or “hermaphrodite,” who extends too far the laws of grammar (“Grammaticae leges ampliat ille nimis” I.20). Jean de Meun, then, employs the myth of the castration of the father (Saturn) giving rise to dissemination in the sea and the birth of desire (Venus) as an allegory for the dismemberment of meaning. Jean’s text, following out the implications of the myth of Saturn’s mutilation, breaks with Guillaume de Lorris’s allegorical, hierarchical truth and disseminates meaning in free-​floating, ever-​to-​be-​supplemented poetic forms and formlessness. The figure of Peter Abelard (1079–​1142) gruesomely instantiates, in both body and mind, the mutilations that menace wholenss here. He upset the canonical, inherited intellectual order with his logical investigations and also violated moral norms—​for which he suffered in his own flesh, being castrated by Eloise’s male relatives as punishment for socially transgressive sex. For Bloch, “Abelard’s status as the arch-​interrupter of genealogy is obvious in the association with castration, in his attitude toward authority, in his doctrine of the Trinity” (145). Even Abelard’s denial of the reality of universals orients this problem away from foundational metaphysics toward dialectical logic and linguistics. All nouns, including general names, refer only to particular things. Thus a thing can be only itself: universality is reserved for concepts or common nouns that apply to many things. Without a foundational self, self-​reflection becomes a proliferation of reflections as mere images of nothing original. The related narrative of the subversiveness of lyric is part of the truth, but not all. What this story leaves out is the transcendent foundation that is not graspable as this or that—​and thus cannot serve as a criterion for separating the proper from the improper. Self-​reflection can be a way of reflecting a ground or unground higher (or lower) than all divisive dichotomies. Such self-​reflection is the royal road to turning upon one’s own presumable starting point or foundation and seizing it as only an image of an ideal toward which one remains in evolution. The ideal is virtual and futural and projects, from within a world of irreconcilable opposites, the unattainable unity after which all strives. The self-​reflexivity of lyric can thus sing “beyond the genius of the sea,” as Wallace Stevens writes in “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Self-​ reflexivity can orient us even to what is beyond any concept or image such as the sea, which in its amorphousness already has much genius for enveloping all in undifferentiated union. The same could be said of Dante’s Paradiso as “the great sea of sense”—​Stierle’s “das grosse Meer des Sinns”—​that empties itself into “the great sea of being” (“lo gran mar dell’essere,” Paradiso I.113). Only self-​reflection can create structure and differentiation within an open sea of limitless possible sense.

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62  Lyric Language as Spiritual Knowledge in its Sensual Immediacy—​Orphic  Echoes

Through its transgressiveness, lyric self-​sensation and self-​auscultation is also the means of connecting us with our most original and salvific sources. Lyric opens and reaches toward a dimension of transcendence by virtue of exceeding all merely human conventions. In premodern ages, poetry as a kind of musica humana aimed to imitate an antecedent musica mundana, or harmony of the universe.1 Crucial is that poetry attain to an actualization of a higher reality. The tradition of poetry as the highest and most original wisdom can be traced back from Romanticism through Italian humanism to classical models and their archaic sources. Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium (c. 1360) contains a theological defense of poetry based on its status as delivering sublime spiritual truths clothed in mythical and metaphorical garb (Books XIV–​XV). Poetry is all the more useful, on that account, for education of the common people. Poetry thereby emerges as an eminent instrument of self-​reflection, one that Boccaccio unveils as enclosing and encoding true philosophy and theology. The status of poetry as revelation of a higher truth was a topic very broadly and diffusely present in the Middle Ages.2 Lyric language was conceived of as essentially theological at the traditionally projected “beginning” of poetic creation in Orpheus.3 Orpheus in ancient and medieval culture represents the ideal of a song that distills the profoundest wisdom into sensual sweetness, rendering the essence of intellectual vision into music. Pico della Mirandola, in his Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486), transmits traditions according to which Pythagoras—​and thereby Plato and others in his following—​would have derived his philosophy from the

1 Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony assembles an immense array of textual testimonies. 2  Current research continues to discover its specific means and ways in a broad range of forays in Litérature et revelation au Moyen Âge, II, Écrire en vers, écrire en prose: Une poétique de la révélation, ed. Catherine Croizy-​Naquet, Littérales 41 (2007): 1–​336. 3  Gregory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), §5, offers hypotheses concerning the origin of Greek poetry as lyric rather than epic.

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Lyric Language as Spiritual Knowledge  305 songs of Orpheus. Jamblicus (c. 250—​c. 330), in his Life of Pythagoras, Chapter XXVIII, 145, relates that Pythagoras based his philosophy on Orphic theology. Song makes everything—​objective world and subjective thought and emotion—​sensually present and harmonious as one. All are ultimately one in the love that is God. Hence the lyric’s most characteristic experience is sheer ecstasy in time-​transcending “pleasure” (“etterno piacere,” Paradiso XX.77). And this plenum, or even infinity, of sensation is at the same time the highest human knowledge—​the Orphic wisdom that lies at the origin of philosophy. Dante’s knowledge in each heaven proves to be limited, and even this knowledge he is unable to express adequately. Only lyric exuberance makes good this lack. The lyric poetics of the Paradiso presuppose that this plenum is supremely pleasurable and that it can be obtained in language that exceeds and implodes semiotic structures in the direction of a non-​representational immediacy resembling that of music. In outlining the peculiar status of the Paradiso as sign through and through, as a sign blocking reference to any other reality, John Freccero suggestively presents the poem as “a non-​representation that is its own reality.”4 Music is such a non-​representational language, as Theodor Adorno argues in “Fragment über Musik und Sprache.” Similar notes were often struck by medieval theories conjugating music and poetry. Such theories advanced by Raimon Vidal (1196–​1252), Guillaume de Machaut (1300–​1377), Eustache Deschamps (1346–​1406), and others, resonate with Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, given its definition of poetry as a “rhetorical fiction made with music” (“fictio rethorica musicaque poita,” II.iv.2).5 Later poetry will sometimes understand itself as a hermeneutic in search of this secret mystery of original poetic rapture. The numerous modern attempts to recover poetry as a higher, natural/​supernatural knowledge, notably among English and German Romantics, are “Orphic” in this broad sense.6 In France, Rimbaud invokes this Orphic source for his own poetic quest by means of a verbal alchemy. And Mallarmé evokes the “Orphic explanation of the Earth” as the “only duty of the poet and the literary game par excellence” (“l’explication orphique de la Terre, qui est le seul devoir du poète et le jeu littéraire par excellence”).7 Surrealist poetry extends his project,8 as does much twentieth-​ century poetry, especially in an occultist vein, for example, by Henri Michaut.9 Rilke’s 4  Freccero, “An Introduction to the Paradiso,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, 214. 5  Original texts, with modern French translations, by all these authors are available in Oc, oïl, si: Les langues de la poésie entre grammaire et musique, ed. Michèle Gally (Paris: Fayard, 2010). 6 Gwendolyn Bays, The Orphic Vison: Seer Poets from Novalis to Rimbaud (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964). Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960). 7  Letter to Paul Verlaine, November 16, 1885. 8  Marcel Raymond, De Baudelaire au surréalisme (Paris: José Corti, 1963). 9  Marc Alyn, La nouvelle poésie française (Paris: Morel, 1968), 149–​52.

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306  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus Sonnets to Orpheus introduce an existentialist twist by equating “song” and “being” (“Gesang ist Dasein,” I.3:1). Dante’s Paradiso, for all its lyricism, remains throughout a tour de force of doctrines, distinctions, and definitions—​that, for example, of the Empyrean, in XXX.39–​42. This content is essential to the song into which it is nevertheless distilled and, in the end, dissolved. Knowledge, human and divine—​ultimately knowledge of the real as a whole—​remains the substance of Dante’s lyric experience. Yet it is all taken up into the sheer ecstasy of song in which any objective knowledge can be contradicted—​ the way diverging spokes of a wheel fall together and coincide in the hub at its center. Apparently contradictory statements agree in the truth at their center (“nel vero farsi come centro in tondo,” XIII.37–​51). The Paradiso revels in contradiction celebrated emblematically in the lyricism of the lark (section 8) that fills in where logic and law concerning the salvation of pagans are suspended. It harmonizes theological opponents such as Aquinas and Siger de Brabant, making them dance in step together. The official wedding of lyric rapture to wisdom takes place at the climax of Purgatory in the Earthly Paradise. This juncture marks the transition into the new poetic mode that dominates in Paradiso. Dante places traditional erotic motifs in this thematically transitional position by creating Mathelda for the terrestrial paradise at the top of mount Purgatory, but even she subsumes science into an essentially higher form of knowledge. A Scholastic language regarding “corollaries” incongruously flows from this flower maiden’s lips (Purgatorio XXVIII.136). Poetry and science, thenceforth, are made to coalesce in the Paradiso. Dante invokes Apollo, the god of science, and Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, in addition to the muses (I.13–​39; II.8). He now requires both peaks of Parnassus—​ both art and science. Beauty is taken to be but the veil of truth, which satisfies desire for the good and for God. In this marriage of truth and beauty, gnoseological fulfillment is consummated by lyric ecstasy.

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63  The Exaltation of Technique in the Troubadours and in Dante’s Stony Rhymes

There is, accordingly, also a highly technical side of modern lyric right from the Troubadours (trobar ric) and it, too, is the result of concentrated self-​reflection. Dante writes poems that exacerbate reflexiveness to the breaking point. This acute self-​ consciousness of craft and artfulness remains one of the directions in which self-​reflection is liable to develop throughout poetic tradition as constitutive of the essential ambiguity of self-​reflection, which also produces ecstatic vision and revelation. Nearer to us, the paramount role of artistic technique surges into the foreground in conjunction with the spiritual aspirations of poetry in the French symbolist movement following Le Parnasse, Gautier, and Baudelaire. But the same unstable synthesis of inspiration and application characterized also Dante’s dolce stil novo long before. This was already a “revolution in poetic language” (Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique) such as the modern French movement would accentuate. In spite of its strong orientation to transcendence, lyric also evinces a powerful propensity to become a technical tour de force. This other, countervailing tendency inherent in self-​reflection is the one that leads toward scientific rationalism and technological apocalypse in our late-​ modern world in crisis (see section 52). This propensity is already present in Dante’s works and operates powerfully still in our science-​dominated culture today. Dante’s stony rhymes (rime petrose) in particular are strongly colored by the physical sciences and by a more material approach to love that tugs against its tendency toward spiritual idealization. Unsurprising in this regard is that the Troubadour for whom Dante shows the keenest interest and affinity is Arnaut Daniel.1 He is celebrated as “best craftsman of the mother tongue” (“miglior fabbro del parlar materno”) in Purgatorio XXVI.117 in a tribute rendered doubly famous by T.  S. Eliot’s passing it on to Ezra Pound for his ingenious editorial work on The Waste Land (1922). Dante’s own sense of the Provençal language’s artistic mystique is intimated by his actually versifying in Provençal the lines he places in the Troubadour’s mouth, ventriloquizing

1  Ronald Martinez, “Dante Embarks Arnaut,” NEMLA Italian Studies 15 (1991): 5–​28.

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308  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus Arnaut in Purgatorio XXVI.140–​47.2 Arnaut’s love for poetic form and craft is blazoned programmatically in probably his best-​known poem beginning: En cest sonet coind’e leri fauc motz e capuig e doli, que serant verai e cert qan n’aurai passat la lima; q’Amors marves plan’e daura mon chantar, que de liei mou qui pretz manten e governa.3 (To this sweet and pretty air I set words that I plane and finish; and every word will fit well, once I have passed the file there, for at once Love polishes and aureates my song, which proceeds from her, ruler and guardian of merit.) Arnaut makes the craft of poetry an obsessive love, if not a religion, and this formal emphasis is carried by Dante to its loftiest heights in the theological apotheosis of poetry in the Paradiso. Nevertheless, Dante’s attempt to assimilate Arnaut’s poetry is first concentrated into his “rime petrose,” his “stony rhymes,” named after the “stony woman” (“donna petrosa”) that they address. These lyrics have been identified as the “first full emergence in Dante’s work” of a “microcosmic poetics” based on the mirroring of the self and its existential dramas.4 Their perturbations include violent and negative feelings reflected into the outer world and in cosmic order and change. Dante’s newfound technique links with a larger Neoplatonic poetics based on correspondences between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of the human body. This analogical language is forced to its limits in the Paradiso, where it collapses in apophasis and even in aphasia, but Dante’s tendency to push its limits, where technical virtuosity reverses into verbal incapacity, is evident much earlier. Dante imitated Arnaut’s lyric poetry and its saturated reflexivity particularly in his sestina, “Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra,” among the rime petrose.5 The “little day” encroached on by the “great circle of shadow” in this initial line may be taken for a symbolization 2  See Roger Dragonetti, “The Double Play of Arnaut Daniel’s Sestina and Dante’s Divine Comedy,” in La Musique et les lettres, 227–​52. 3 Goldin, Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères, 216–​17. 4  Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s Rime Petrose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 3. 5 Dante, Rime, ed., Gianfranco Contini (Torino: Einaudi, 1946), 154–​57.

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The Exaltation of Technique  309 of the small margin of free choice within the strict rules of the sestina form. As Leslie Fiedler perceptively interprets it, “The sestina is presided over by a kind of cold mathematics that function like fate.” The form, with its repetitious endings determined by a strict calculus, is itself “a dialogue between freedom and necessity … loaded heavily on the side of necessity—​a predestinarian dialogue.”6 It is finally in the commiato at the end that the key words achieve “their fated relationship, which has desperately been evaded through six stanzas” (Fiedler, 25). These extremely rigorous formal demands make a myth out of technique, one found still among modernist poets like Pound. Indeed, technique becomes a “good in itself,” to the point where “technique is mythicized and becomes the actual subject of the poem” (Fiedler, 25). Critics unanimously remark this “exasperated technicism” (Natalino Sapegno’s “esasperato tecnicismo”). The tension or even contradiction between form and intent becomes key to the poem’s impact. Verse so highly wrought by this tension could become a machine void of spiritual significance—​like modern technology in our reductively secular culture today. However, Dante pursues the tension to a point where form explodes and opens to an unchartable dimension that he will later interpret as theological transcendence. His supposed coldness of technique is mirrored thematically in the coldness of the “stony woman.” This “donna pietra,” for whom the poem is written, epitomizes an unfulfillable desire. The wintry landscape, with its rockiness and withering grass, similarly reflects the paradoxically frozen lover, his amorous and, above all, linguistic entrapment. The rigidity of disciplined form in tension with love’s impetuous passion dramatizes the essential contradictoriness of poetic expression. The lyric impulse involves both an impassioned élan toward an ineffable elevation and a concentrated focus on technical aspects of language. Gianfranco Contini emphasizes the mystical devotion to language and its form embodied in this composition. He marks Dante’s return to Arnaut Daniel as the most genuine source for this exaltation of the “energetic and evocative value of the word.” He calls this “an exercise in verbal mysticism that begins from the word in rhyme” (“… persuaso del valore energico ed evocativo della parola, Dante si rifà alle fonti più genuine particularmente ad Arnaut Daniel, … un esercizio di mistica verbale che parte dalla parola in rima …”).7 In De vulgari eloquentia II.iv.10, Dante goes so far as to suggest that through assiduous study of technique and strenuous ingenuity (“strenuitate ingenii”) poets can become “beloved of God” (“Dei dilectos,” echoing Aeneid VI.126–​31). They can be raised by their ardent virtue to heaven 6  Leslie A.  Fiedler, “Dante: Green Thoughts in a Green Shade. Reflections on the Stony Sestina of Dante Alighieri,” in No in Thunder (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 21–​44, Citation 24. 7 Dante, Rime, ed. Contini, 148.

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310  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus and be called children of the gods (“et ab ardente virtute sublimatos ad ethera deorumque filios vocat”). Technique and divine inspiration are inseparable here, and they are fused, furthermore, with moral and civic virtue. All this is one in the wholeness and nobility of human existence as Dante conceives it. This concrete engagement of the total person of the poet is presupposed by any formalist poetics that Dante proffers. Dante covers with contempt the foolish presumption of those who think that they can arrive at the highest style of poetic song (“ad summa summe canenda prorumpant”) by ingenuity alone (“solo ingenio confidentes”), without art and science (“arte scientiaque immunes,” De vulgari II.iv.11). The poet aspiring to sing of the highest matters must, first, drink deep from Helicon (“prius Elicone potutus,” II.iv.9) but must also submit to the exacting labor of learning his craft (“hoc opus et labor est,” II.iv.10). In the sestina (as already in the sonnet), Dante discovers the radical reflexivity of poetic language that he pursues to an apotheosis in the Paradiso. Words tend to lose all positive content and are defined only reciprocally by their mutual difference. They compose a system of binary oppositions that enables a world to be organized as a purely linguistic universe. In the case of Dante’s sestina, key oppositions are love/​loneliness, growth/​stasis, hope/​death. The six stanzas of the poem are set up as a series of such thematic antitheses: Dante’s anomalous green in Winter (I) versus Lady Petra’s anomalous cold in Spring (II); Dante as prisoner (III) versus Dante as fugitive (IV); wishful thinking (V) versus pessimism (VI). The verse-​terminating words are repeated according to sestina convention in each stanza, with rotation of the last of the six to the first position in each successive stanza. They are then doubled up in the three-​line finale and paired off into couples that combine warm and living (donna, erba, verde) with cold and dead (petra, colli, ombra). By the metaphysics of this formal system, the world is generated in such a way that the woman (“donna”), the object of desire, is revealed as essentially “stone” (“petra”). Her being donna is reduced to semblance (“come fosse donna”) rather than essence, and indeed donna itself assumes a purely abstract significance defined by the poem’s internal system of meaning. Similar attenuations of ordinary semantic values occur to “colli” (“hills”) and “ombra” (“shadow”). “Erba” (“grass”), like “verde” (“green”), becomes interchangeably a symbol of life and of death. Growing on the stone of the tomb, grass only thinly veils death—​ as in Isaiah’s “all flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field” (40:6). The words are no longer being used to express a univocal intention. They occur where they occur as predetermined by a complicated linguistic-​poetic algorithm and its system of rules. Different, even contradictory, meanings are brought out of them at each occurrence. Potentially they contain any and all meanings. Wherever the verse-​terminating words occur, they are nodal points of energy—​centers of emanation reflecting

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The Exaltation of Technique  311 meanings of other words being organized around them. As symbols, they are concrete universals, potentially identical with everything. All distinctions collapse into one reality, ostensibly that of the lyric “I.” Dante’s experience with the dolce stil novo, as well as with the trobar clus in the form in which he found it among the “Guittoniani,” were but preliminary stages in his development as a lyric artist. His preparation was not complete until he had passed fully through his sustained encounter with the Provençal masters, particularly Arnaut. This is the line of lyric experiment that reaches its perfection in the verses of the Paradiso. The technical emphasis of this work, as also of Book II of De vulgari eloquentia, remains still remarkably “an index of spirituality in the poet himself.”8 In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante explains that concrete examples from the greatest of poets are indispensable for illustrating the standards and norms of the finest style of composition in the highest form, the canzone, because no fixed formulas or precepts can adequately state them (“non enim hanc quam suppremam vocamus constructionem nisi per huiusmodi exempla possumus indicare,” II.vi.7). In this vision of poetry, technique and inspiration cannot be dissociated. Distinguished by both, Dante’s dolce stil nuovo recognizes its forerunner in Arnaut Daniel. The tension between an overly self-​reflexive, narcissistic art-​for-​art’s sake versus an inspired poetry envisaging a transcendence of what can be said directly by language in its normal employments is already acute in this poetic progenitor. Arnaud’s poetry is often judged to be circumscribed by a reductively technical brilliance overshadowing and even obscuring content: The paradox of the verbal involutions of Arnaut Daniel’s verse is that it excludes the woman who would seem to inspire it in the first instance. She is an occluded pre-​text of a love discourse meant to impress other poets, all of whom are male. The rhetorical challenge uses the woman to valorise the poet, and is thus etiologically linked to the primordial narcissism which demands self-​glorification.9 This suggestion of narcissism has far-​reaching implications not only for the psychological but also for the ontological underpinnings of lyric. This is a topic in which Dante shows the keenest interest and one that his critics have assiduously pursued. Its broader implications in the cultural history of the West have been adumbrated in ways well worth reviewing.

8 Took, Dante: Lyric Poet and Philosopher, 142–​43. 9 Cholakian, Troubadour Lyric: A Psychocritical Reading, 184.

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64  Lyric Reflexivity in Panoptic Historical-​Philosophical Perspective—​Troubadours, Christianity, and Romanticism

In his essay on “the extended poem” in The Other Voice, Octavio Paz contends that modern poetry has taken poetry itself for its theme by a conflation of song (canto) and narrative (cuento).1 The two become identified, starting with Romanticism, which “made song into the story itself. I  mean: the story of the song became the story itself, the theme of the poem was poetry itself” (“hizo del canto el cuento mismo. Quiero decir: el cuento del canto fue el canto, el tema del poema fue la poesía misma,” 25). Paz brings out self-​reflectiveness, its persistent thematization of itself as poetry, as the defining characteristic of modern poetry, from its inception with the Romantics. The modern poem is “narrative which turns into song and song which, in telling a story, sings itself to itself—​to the act of singing” (“cuento que se vuelve canto y canto que, al contar el cuento, se canta a sí mismo—​al acto de cantar,” 25). Song becomes the story of itself—​its history turned into song. Such singing can substitute, moreover, for the loving that is sung about and itself becomes the fulfillment of that love. Paz considers this self-​reflexivity to be characteristic of the modern age presumably because the individual subject becomes the new fulcrum for a comprehensive determination of the real in modern times. However, we have seen that self-​reflexivity emerges already with vernacular lyric in its medieval origins and becomes fully reflective theoretically and theologically with Dante, especially in his Paradiso. What has often been described as characteristic of modern poetry might be taken more broadly to disclose something essential about the nature of poetry per se. This specular structure does not so much distinguish a particular moment in poetic history as determine a concept of the essentially poetic—​and even of the real itself (at least as it can be apprehended culturally). For anything to be recognized as “real,” it can hardly avoid the reflexivity that comes with its being represented in language. Beyond all historical explanations for why self-​reflexiveness should define modern poetry—​or perhaps any poetry that has at last come into its own—​this fact of seeing specular

1  Octavio Paz, La otra voz: Poesía y fin de siglo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990).

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Lyric Reflexivity in Panoptic Perspective  313 self-​reflective structures in everything belongs to us, to Paz, to our commentary invoking him, to the tradition of Western literature as a whole, and even to thought as such. It is a constant motif of the perennial attempt to conceive of something that can attain to the relative stability or “eternity” of meaning. The sonnet, as the pathbreaking form of modern lyric poetry in the West, epitomizes this stability achieved through self-​reflective specularity. Invented in the thirteenth century in Italy, the sonnet form has a claim to being considered the matrix of modernity in its being engendered by self-​reflection. The sonnet introduced, according to Paul Oppenheimer, [T]‌he logic of a form that turned expression inward, to a resolution in the abiding peace of the soul itself, or if one were not so certain of the existence of the soul, in reason. Reason, after all, was perceived as a manifestation of God’s mind and of divine love.2 The sonnet’s intensively self-​reflective structure, redoubling repeatedly in recursive folds its inward reflection on self, opens in this way to a dimension of theological transcendence that will become explicit in Dante’s Paradiso. Its self-​reflexivity seems to make modern poetry a typical expression of narcissism. We overlook, however, what made this self-​reflexive turn compelling if we simply reject it as obviously futile, vain narcissism. We take a common sense view of the relation of inside and outside and condemn self-​reflexiveness for dwelling upon an empty self in sterile isolation. This is to forget the higher-​order worlds that have been discovered within the self, for example, by Plotinus. Such a dismissive judgment does not understand transcendence profoundly enough. It takes transcendence simply as an outside, as lying without and above the self and the world, whereas for Augustine, to name one crucial reference, transcendence is the source and origin of the inner self. Even among moderns, for example, Proust and Eliot, interior worlds are discovered with a sense of their opening upon a transcendent order of things. Once transcendence is understood apophatically as transcending all positive determinations, it needs to be apprehended from all directions and thus as “transdescendence” no less than as “transascendence.” Jean Wahl forges these terms for bridging between ancient Christian (specifically Pauline and Patristic) and Heideggerian transcendence, which is supposedly without theology, in ways that indelibly marked the thinking of Levinas and Derrida among others.3 2  Paul Oppenheimer, The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3–​4. 3  Wahl’s landmark lecture “Existence humaine et transcendence” (1937) is placed in the context of its history of effect in Human Existence and Transcendence, ed. William C. Hackett (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016).

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314  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus Modern lyric poetry can plausibly be made to begin with the Troubadours. Their language, Provençal, and more profoundly the language of lyric, thereby emerges as an Ur-​vernacular of Europe. It is an artsy poetry, refined, often learned and cultured, not folksy or pragmatic. Troubadour song, beginning with Guilhem’s writing, is “for art’s sake” and essentially without extra-​literary motivations—​none, anyway, that are not erased in the context of the whole artwork. Such art is based on the self-​conscious and sometimes exasperated development of craft in place of practical communication. And yet, precisely this absoluteness of art may achieve something theological in purport. Form becomes an autonomous value: formal invention can be inspired and reveal truth. In this way, writing becomes an indispensable medium of poetry, with far-​ reaching consequences (section 5). It signals the attempt to seize reality, even a transcendent presence, in the medium of experience itself by specular reflection. Hence the special role of mirrors in Troubadour poetry and in lyric generally.4 Sicilian lyric is the major link between Troubadour tradition and Dante. Its leading figure in crucial respects, notably as inventor of the sonnet form, is Giacomo Lentini. His name contains the Italian word lente for “lens,” which works as an emblem for the centrality of optics, the science of reflections, to the mirroring function of this style of lyric. Lentini’s fifty-​five or so poems are dominated as a whole by the imagery of reflection of visual images. The word viso, used for sight, face, and vision, plays through a virtuoso diapason of reflections of the same. They come to focus around a meditation on how love is generated by images. This, too, is the dynamic work of self-​reflection, which opens a new, revolutionary dimension of love in lyric. Juri Lotman and the Tartu school analyze the social semiotics of mirrors in a way that emphasizes their opening to a wholly other world. Lotman suggests that the mirror is typically a border between our world and an other world—​as in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland. “Thus, in the history of culture, the mirror is revealed as a semiotic machine for the description of an ‘other’ structure” (“Così, nella storia della cultura lo specchio si rivela una machina semiotica per la descrizione di una struttura ‘altrui’ ”).5 The mirror effects a structural reorganization that, even in presenting an identical image, transposes it into another register. This capacity is most simply emblematized by the fact of the reversal of left and right in the mirror image. In a sense, all signs are

4  Frederick Goldin, The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). More broadly, Mark Pendergrast, Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection (New York: Basic Books, 2003) reflects on the shifting valences of the mirror trope in Western culture as turning on reflective repetition. 5 Juri M.  Lotman, “La semiotica dello specchio e della specularità,” in Il simbolo e lo specchio, ed. Romeao Galassi and Marherita De Michiel (Napoli: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1997), 129.

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Lyric Reflexivity in Panoptic Perspective  315 originally mirrors: semiosis is born with mirror reflection and vice versa. At their core, speculation and semiosis are “inextricable,” as Umberto Eco demonstrates.6 Rooted in this submerged continuity, there is an immeasurably rich esoteric tradition that stands deeper in the background here,7 one that figures pervasively in Dante’s works, with their thirty explicit references to specchio and its cognates.8 Jean-​François Marquet develops the alchemical background of the esoteric pseudo-​science of mirrors, drawing on Robert Marteau’s numerous poetic works, notably Liturgie (1992).9 This mirror motif is crucial for Dante’s self-​reflexive revelation of truth, especially as it opens into another world.

6 Umberto Eco, Sugli specchi e altri saggi: Il segno, la rappresentazione, l’illusione, l’immagine (Milan: Bompiani, 2001), 10: “Ed ecco che percezione, pensiero, coscienza della propria soggettività, esperienza speculare, semiosis, appaiono come momenti di un nodo abbastanza inestricabile.” 7 Elémire Zolla, “La verità è uno specchio,” in Verità, segrete esposte in evidenza: Sincretismo e fantasia, contemplazione ed esotericità (Venice: Marsilio, 1990). 8  H. D. Austin, “Dante and Mirrors,” Italica 21/​1 (1944): 13–​1. 9  Jean-​François Marquet, Miroirs de l’identité: La littérature hantée par la philosophie (Paris: Mermann, 1996).

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65  Romantic Singularity as a New Universal Reflexivity

Occitanian poetry introduced new, non-​ classical aesthetic and moral values. It exalted a personal style expressed by formal originality rather than by universally rational order and developed a theory of love as a natural virtue and as the principle of all good human action. This favored an intellectual non-​conformism, or freethinking based on personal and passionate experience of profane love.1 This vein of culture directly feeds Dante’s own milieu. Guido Cavalcanti’s “Donna me prega” comprises a philosophical treatise in the form of a lyric poem showing how human reason is inherently emotional—​a view grounded in the Arabic-​ Aristotelianism of Al-​Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes.2 This new poetry is a remote source of Romantic as opposed to classical values, and it pivots on self-​reflection. It is made possible by the biblical notion of the individual as of infinite worth because of being made in the image of God. This status is reflected primarily in and through an unlimited capacity for passion and for relationships. Such absolute subjectivity was destined to reach a theoretical climax in Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith (Fear and Trembling, 1843) and in ensuing forms of existentialism. Unconditional amorous devotion expresses the infinite freedom of the individual and of subjective acts of willing. This involves totally mediating oneself through a defining relation with an Other. Radical Protestantism, as in Kierkegaard’s case, becomes one of the cultural matrices that continues developing this sensibility and outlook. This new sense of individuality registers in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia in the form of a rationality that curiously does not impose uniformity among human beings but rather fosters the different individual sensibilities and choices of each. Dante conceives of human rationality as diversifying singular individuals: “and reason itself, whether in discernment or in judgment or in willing, is diversified in individuals” 1 René Nelli et René Lavaud, Les Troubadours: Le trésor poétique de L’Occitanie (II) (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1966), Introduction. 2 Gregory B.  Stone, “Animals Are from Venus, Human Beings from Mars: Averroes’s Aristotle and the Rationality of Emotion in Guido Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna me prega’,” PMLA 130/​5 (2015): 1269–​84.

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Romantic Singularity—New Reflexivity  317 (“et ipsa ratio vel circa discretionem vel circa iudicium vel circa electionem diversificetur in singulis,” I.iii.1). Human or rational consciousness is thereby differentiated from the mental processes of beasts, whose passions and instincts are all identical across the species. The faculty of speech, as exercised by human reason ad placitum, in different parts of the earth produces different languages. And each is further inflected by the irreducibly personalized reasoning and decision making of the free individual. Such a self-​conscious structure of language and love opens a whole new dimension of inner experience that was prepared for in philosophical and mystic tradition by Plotinus and Augustine. Georges Poulet argues that all the self-​knowledge of the ancients from Socrates up to Plotinus, as enshrined in the inscription gnothi seauton (“Know thyself!”) over the oracle at Delphi, did not amount to a genuine act of self-​consciousness: it lacked individual awareness of personal existence and entailed, instead, knowledge of general truths about humanity. Such self-​knowing was rather a knowing of self in and through knowing the universe and one’s place in it. A truly existential knowledge of personal existence begins only with Christianity. “It is with Christianity that self-​knowledge becomes knowledge of an existence and no longer of an essence” (“C’est avec le christianisme que la connaissance de soi devient la connaissance d’une existence et non plus d’une essence”).3 Particularly Saint Augustine develops a new, intimate knowledge of the self. Finally, modern self-​ consciousness, as in Descartes’s cogito or Kant’s Selbstbewusstsein, is made possible by the Reformers and their Augustinian sense of an individual existence that is guilty but forgiven before God and made wholly new by his grace.4 These theological origins of self-​consciousness are reminders of how far removed from a simple reduction of all to self the phenomenon of self-​reflection stands. Such reflection springs, instead, historically, out of consciousness of the infinite otherness of God. This historical derivation determines certain implications that are built into reflection. Lyric language is especially apt for exploring the transcendent ground that self-​ consciousness of a singular person reflects in new and provocative ways. Indeed lyric is the original mirror in which self-​consciousness immediately develops and expresses itself. This is the case already with the lyricism of Augustine’s Confessions.5 The ineffable divinity becomes no longer remote, as in Plato’s purely intellectual ideal. Divinity is found, rather, as the deepest reality of the self and as accessible to experience by means of self-​reflexive speculation. The 3  Georges Poulet, Entre moi et moi: Essais critiques sur la conscience de soi (Paris: José Corti, 1977), 10. 4  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) investigates this history in its philosophical ramifications. 5  Vincenzo Cilento, “Lo spirito poetico e la novità dell’opera agostiniana,” in Agostiniana (Naples: Istituto Editoriale del Mezzogiorno, 1955), 141–​58.

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318  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus divine revelation, in principle, is of an ineffable Other, but in practice it is apprehended self-​reflexively. As in the Vita nuova, the reflective medium of memory (I.1) reveals things as they are (sicuti sunt)—​essentially rather than just accidentally. Lyric can, of course, reduce everything to a mere reflection of self. This would seem to be the case with Cavalcanti, despite his theory of love as rational. Witness his dramatization of the inferno of the self-​enclosed mind singing its destructive love in inconsolable despair.6 But lyric can also be a triumphant revelation of light, as in Dante, thanks to its theological exposition and apotheosis. Dante’s speculative turn inward by means of the language of love as absolute reality carries these impulses and inspiration from Troubadour lyric to their radical conclusion. Renunciation of enjoyment of an external object opens the possibility of an immediate consummation of love in the lyric itself. Hugo Friedrich points out the inward nature of the satisfaction and fulfillment celebrated by this poetry of “joie.” Such poetic joy—​in Provençal gaug, deriving from Latin gaudium—​confers happiness through an inner perfection (“Glück durch innere Vollkommenheit”).7 Friedrich stresses particularly the renunciation of outward-​ directed sexual drives involved in this joy in sheer loving: “This is the joy that is reserved for ennobling renunciation” (“Es ist die Freude, die nur dem veredelnden Verzicht gelingt”). Such renunciation entails a complete interiorization of erotic drive and delight: “Overcoming of desire, entry into the realm where renunciation opens other eyes for beauty than those of the body, where the Lady does not even need to be present because poetic thinking of her is already fulfillment” (“Überwindung des Begehrens, Eintritt in jenes Reich, wo Entsagung andere Augen für die Schönheit öffnet  als die Augen des Körpers, wo die Herrin nicht einmal gegenwärtig zu sein braucht, weil der dichtende Gedanke an sie schon Erfüllung ist,” 13). We see Dante making this move already in Vita nuova XVIII.6, after being denied his Lady’s “salute” and therewith all manifest consolation. Still, no one and nothing can prevent him from composing his words of praise for her and making just this his blessedness. There is, however, something illusory about a one-​ sided emphasis on inwardness. David Wellbery analyzes the Romantic myth of interiority as arising out of a suppression of the exterior technical means that make the supposedly “inner voice” possible. The “rooting of the lyric in specularity” belongs to “a myth of the lyric that begins to emerge around 1770.”8 In the Romantic myth that springs especially from Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language (Abhandlung über den Ursprung 6 Robert Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uuniversity Press, 1988), Chapter 4: “The Ghost of Guido Cavalcanti” reconstructs this drama. 7  Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956). 8 David E.  Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginings of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 187.

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Romantic Singularity—New Reflexivity  319 der Sprache, 1772), interiority originates from a primordial orality that eliminates externality. Homer is heard as the voice of the people, not as an individual external to others, but rather as the inner voice of all. He speaks or sings from within the nature of things themselves. The externality of the technology of writing is supposedly circumvented. However, precisely the opposite is the case with Dante, who underscores at the very beginning of the Vita nuova how his interiority is itself externally mediated and always already constituted as a book of memory (“libro de la mia memoria,” I.1). Likewise, from the outset of his epic poem, memory wrote what the first-​person protagonist “saw” (“O mente che scrivesti ciò ch’io vidi,” Inferno II.8). Wellbery maintains that the Romantic myth of “the absolutization of voice” introduces personality as a revolutionary novum into the world, but he is ignoring its anticipation by the dolce stil novo and numerous other poetic sequels. He highlights the regressive recovery of an infantile language linked with “primordial donation, the gift of the mother’s luminescent presence” (187), which is likewise anticipated by Dante, particularly in the Paradiso, with its persistent imagery of the nursing infant.9 The narcissism of modern lyric needs to be placed in this extended historical perspective in order to highlight its revolutionary and revelatory power—​but also its eventually recoiling into a reductive posture cutting its subject off from the transcendent sources of self. We have noted recurrently how Julia Kristeva analyzed the peculiar, sublimated pattern of love developed by Troubadour lyric as “narcissistic.”10 Frederick Goldin likewise broadly declares Narcissus “a paradigm of the evolution of self-​consciousness.” In Ovid’s myth, the medieval poets found the representation of their own radically new experience of “the birth of self-​consciousness through love.”11 Kristeva and Goldin have both insisted on the narcissistic structure of self-​reflection as constitutive of the modern subject that originates in the birthing of the modern lyric. In the lyric, Narcissus’s self-​love gives birth to the subject. According to Kristeva, “this auto-​eros, which appears to us as a sublime hypostasis of narcissistic love, had to constitute the decisive step in the acquisition of an interior space, the autoreflexive space of the Western psyche” (“cet autou eros qui nous paraît comme une hypostase sublime de l’amour narcissique, devait constituer le pas décisif dans l’assomption de l’espace intérieur, espace autoréflexif du psychisme occidental,” 141). Saint Augustine would most convincingly discover this space of eroticized introspection and thereby lay the psychological foundations of Western culture.12 9 Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body. 10 Kristeva, Histoires d’amour, “Narcisse: la nouvelle démence” and “Les troubadours.” 11 Goldin, Mirror, 210, 22. 12  Jérôme Lagouanère, Intériorité et réflexivitié dans la pensée de Saint Augustin: Formes et genèse d’une conceptualisation (Paris: Institut des Études Augustiniennes, 2012).

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320  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus Kristeva, furthermore, following Plotinus (especially Enneads I.vi.8), treats Odysseus as the antithesis of Narcissus, an anti-​Narcissus in his quest for his fatherland (“Ulysse vers le père,” 139–​40). For Plotinus and Neoplatonism, as we saw in sections 60–​61, the Odyssean and the Narcissistic impulses might correct each other: Odysseus bends self-​ reflection and self-​awareness toward the father as transcendent Source. Dante’s Ulysses, in contrast, turns his back on his father and is not redeemed. He serves, instead, as model for a false transcendence needing to be renounced. Humans are indeed subject to many such illusions of self-​transcendence that, in fact, remain only within immanence.13 Dante finally separates his own path sharply from Ulysses’s, with his reference to the “mad crossing of Ulysses” (“varco /​folle di Ulisse”) in Paradiso XXVII.82–​83. Dante takes, instead, the speculative path of love for the Other as constituting the interior unity of his soul. Shoaf maintains that Dante opts for the path of Narcissus and redeems it, having been initially attracted by the way of Ulysses, which he finally renounces. Nevertheless, Dante remains still acutely conscious of the Ulyssean impulse working within him all the way to his final “winged” ascent to God (Paradiso XXXIII.139). “Wings” are a transformation of “oars” (“de’ remi facemmo ali”) in the “mad flight” (“folle volo”) of Inferno XXVI.125. In the end, Ulysses represents a vicious narcissism that recognizes neither son nor wife, nor father, nor the transcendent Other—​ until too late, with his damnation, ironically, “as pleased another” (“com’altrui piacque,” 141). Dante, in contrast, has folded an orientation to transcendent divinity into his own self-​reflection as a redeemed Narcissus.

13 Ingolf Dalferth, Transzendenz und säkulare Welt: Lebensorientierung an letzter Gegenwart.

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66  Dante’s Narcissus Redeemed—​A Perennial Paradigm for Contemporary Thought

There are many warnings in the Middle Ages against a self-​generating, incestuous sort of production of sense in the language of lyric. John of Salisbury and others, relaying Patristic admonishments, had spelled out moral strictures concerning the narcissism inherent in ornately rhetorical and particularly in lyrical language. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is a beautiful and profound dramatization of the characteristic narcissistic dilemmas of lyric speech in a medieval perspective.1 Dante was anything but blind to these moral risks and pitfalls. There is a conscious endeavor on his part to use lyrical language in a way that does not reduce it to the self but rather opens it to a dimension of spiritual and theological transcendence. By pursuing this project, he undertakes symbolically to redeem Narcissus. This means that he endeavors to accord a foundational and a fertile role (rather than a degenerative one) to the basic structure of self-​reflexive affection in language and love alike. From God all the way down through the creation, self-​reflexivity is highlighted and affirmed as the original mode of being of both Creator and creation. The climactic vision of the celestial rose in the Empyrean features the simile of the hillside or slope (“clivo”) mirroring itself in the water at its base, as if to admire its adornment, rich in greenery and blossoms (XXX.109–​14). This stands for the blessed souls of the celestial rose mirroring themselves in the river of God’s light. All of Paradise is manifest in these verses (quoted at the end of Part I, section 14) as a narcissistic self-​reflection of divinity in the blessed souls. Throughout the poem, the sublimest truths of Christian doctrine are distilled into such forms of self-​reflection. The Empyrean is described with a concentration of lyrical and specifically pastoral imagery filtered through the Bible, especially the Book of Revelation. The river of light (compare Revelation 22:1 and Daniel 7:10, as well as Psalms 36:9; 46:5; 65:10; and Isaiah 66:12) between flowery banks, which will be transmogrified into the celestial rose, suggests that

1 I show this in Secular Scriptures, Chapter  2, section II on Troilus and section III on “Truth and the Lyrical” (52–​69).

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322  Dante’s Redemption of Narcissus a lyrical content is the most appropriate for adumbrating the ineffable reality of which these images are the “shadowy prefaces” (“umbriferi prefazii,” XXX.78). This essential experience is condensed, however, into the untranslatable lyrical quality of the verses.2 Even more decisively than at the thematic level, self-​reflection determines the Paradiso in its linguistic and poetic form. This is what the poem cannot directly say but rather does and is. It registers ineffably in the experience of the poem, so it lends itself little to belabored exegesis. This register invites, instead, to theoretical reflection. Nonetheless, the major theoretical concepts—​like incarnation—​find themselves instantiated feelingly in sensuously lyrical verses. Dante presents, as one supreme and original instance of lyric, the angelic annunciation of the Incarnation. The “circulata melodia” of XXIII.109 resurfaces in the “divina cantilena” of XXXII.97, which makes reference again to the Archangel Gabriel as … quello amor che primo lì discese,   cantando “Ave Maria, gratia plena,”

        (XXXII.94–​ 95)

(… that love which first descended there,   singing “Ave Maria, gratia plena,”) Among the exquisitely lyrical verses that are paramount for conveying the thoroughgoing lyricism of the Empyrean—​its lyrical consistency and essence—​are those in which Beatrice first defines for Dante this heaven of pure light:       “Noi siamo usciti  fore   del maggior corpo al ciel ch’ è pura luce: luce intellettual, piena d’amore;   amor di vero ben, pien di letizia;   letizia che trascende ogni dolzore.”

       (XXX.38–​ 42)

    (“We have now  left   the largest body of the heaven that is pure light, intellectual light, full of love;   love of true good, full of felicity;   felicity that transcends every sweetness.”)

2 On the lyricism of Canto XXX, see Egidio Guidubaldi, “Lettura del canto XXX del ‘Paradiso’,” Aevum 36 (1962): 46–​76 and Riccardo Scrivano, “Poesia e dottrina nel XXX canto del ‘Paradiso,’ ” Critica letteraria 62 (1989): 3–​16: “la minuta filigrana di ripetizioni, ora fondate su elementi semantici ora su elementi fonici” (8).

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Dante’s Narcissus Redeemed  323 It is especially the lyrical interlacing of the verses, folding the end of each verse back in order to begin the next (rhetorically speaking, “anadiplosis,” literally “double-​folding up”), in which semantic and phonetic elements become inextricably interwoven, that makes them a realization of oneness. Difference is evoked at the end, but as transcended in a whole integrating both poles (delight and pain). Such is the synthetic nature of lyric as our reflections have discovered it. Lyric reflexivity is everywhere indissociable from Dante’s presentation of the Empyrean, since Paradise proper is beyond representation. We can only chart the ways of representation that Dante employs in order to suggest—​working under its impress—​what lies beyond representation. We can do so only in exemplary readings of the lyrical quality of language in the Paradiso. Light and love together comprehend and make up the consistency of the Empyrean in self-​reflective ways that the Epilogue undertakes, one final time, to refract.

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 pilogue: Reflexive Stylistics in the E Language of Paradiso

Dante seems to announce that there is, or at least that he wishes there to be, something unique and matchless about the poetic craft and/​or inspiration of the third and final cantica of his great poem. Whereas one Parnassian peak sufficed for the two preceding cantiche, now the poet requires two: Infino a qui l’un giogo di Parnaso   assai mi fu; ma or con amendue   m’è uopo intrar ne l’arringo rimasto.

            (I.16–​ 18)

(Up to here, one peak of Parnassus   was enough for me, but now both   are necessary as I enter the remaining ring.) He entreats both Apollo and the Muses (science and poetry) to guide him across the never-​before-​traversed waters he embarks on with his ascent to the first heaven: L’aqua ch’io prendo già mai non si corse:   Minerva spira, e conducemi Apollo,   e nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse.

            (II.7–​ 9)

(The waters I embark on have never yet been sailed:   Minerva inspires and Apollo guides me,   and the nine Muses show me the bears.) Yet exactly what the specific difference of the style of Paradiso consists in is not obvious: it is not made explicit by the text. In order to understand what is special about the language of Paradiso, we might begin by testing the consistency of Paradise itself in Dante’s creation.

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Epilogue  325 The navigation metaphor is a significant clue. Already broached at the opening of Purgatorio (“Per correr miglior acqua alza le vele /​omai la navicella del mio ingegno, /​che lascia dietro a sé mar si crudele …” I.1–​ 3) and in Inferno I’s reference to shipwreck (22–​24), it is newly insisted upon in Paradiso, when Dante addresses the few (“voi altri pochi”) capable of reading the Commedia through to its highest reaches as those who can follow in his wake: metter potete ben per l’alto sale   vostro navigio, servando mio solco   dinanzi a l’acqua che ritorna equale.           (II.13–​ 15)

(you can well set sail on the high sea   with your ship in my wake   before the water returns to being level.) The navigation metaphor resurfaces again in the poem’s finale with the allusion to Neptune’s astonishment to see the shadow of the Argo passing over him (XXXIII.94–​ 96). This trope of navigation, as convertible with aviation, refers undisguisedly to the journey through the planetary spheres. Paradise (and sometimes even God himself) is repeatedly described as a kind of sea: … lo gran mar de l’essere … (I.113)    (… the great sea of being…) Ell’è quel mare al qual tutto si move … (III.86)   (It is that sea toward which all moves …) The divine Presence thus appears, at least metaphorically, to resemble a watery sort of element. At the same time, it is a sea of light—​a region penetrated by the radiance of God, as announced from the very first verses: La gloria di colui che tutto move   per l’universo penetra, e risplende   in una parte più e meno altrove. Nel ciel che piu de la sua luce prende   fu’ io …

           (I.1–​ 4)

(The glory of him who moves all   through the universe penetrates and shines   in some parts more and elsewhere less. In the heaven that takes most of his light   I was …)

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326  Reflexive Stylistics To the poet of the Paradiso, the imageries of light and of water seem to feel so close as to bleed into one another and virtually coalesce: parvemi tanto allor del cielo acceso   de la fiamma del sol, che pioggia o fiume   lago non fece mai tanto disteso.

          (I.79–​ 81)

(it then seemed to me that so much of the heaven was afire   with the flame of the sun that rain or river   had never made a lake so large.) The same pairing and implicit equivalence of light and water images can be observed in the last two terzinas of Canto I, which illustrate how Dante’s ascent into heaven is as natural, first, as the descent of a river from the mountains, and then, as the upward propensity of a flame (I.136–​41). This association is sustained throughout the whole cantica. For instance, in Canto XXXI the threefold light (“trina luce”) of verse 28 becomes in verse 93 an eternal fountain (“eterna fontana”). A similar message in this regard is conveyed by the rainbow and flood imagery of XII.10–​18 and again by the river of light in XXX.61–​63. Light and water, as reflective mediums, have certain properties in common which may have recommended them to the poet’s sensibility as the most appropriate vehicles for conveying to the imagination his conception of Paradise, a conception also known to us as articulated by him in doctrinal terms. There is a kind of unity, a continuous flow, in a body of water or region of light—​each is incomposite, without discrete parts—​yet with varying degrees of depth and intensity throughout their whole expanse. Thus, a sea of light is the ideal way of imagining Paradise defined as a graduated resplendence of God’s glory, for it is at once completely continuous, without breaks or separations, and yet smoothly variable, with each different point illuminated or submerged more or less than the next. All the inhabitants of Paradise enjoy union with God, all dwell in the Empyrean by contemplating Him, and yet each possesses a distinct grade of beatitude, according to their different capacities, their “virtù diverse” (II.139; II.70). This characterization of the imaginative substrate of the realm of Paradise helps us to recognize and individuate crucial features of the homonymous poem’s style. The elements of water and light share in common a diaphanous quality, which is surely one of the distinguishing marks of Paradiso’s poetry. It is seen and heard in descriptive lines such as those cited at the outset (section 1) sounding the stylistic keynote for the canticle: Quali per vetri trasparenti e tersi,   o ver per acque nitide e tranquille,

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Epilogue  327   non si profonde che i fondi sien persi, tornan de’ nostri visi le postille   debili sì, che perla in bianca fronte   non vien men tosto a le nostre pupille … .

       (III.10–​ 15; emphasis  added)

(As in transparent and polished glass,   or in pure and tranquil water,   not so deep that the bottoms vanish, the reflected images of our faces return   so weak that pearl on a white forehead   does not strike our pupils more … .) Particularly striking here is the delicateness of the images (like pearl on a white background), and the same can be said of the sounds of the words as well. A subtle harmony plays in the intricate interlacing of assonances and alliterations in the symmetrically paired words “trasparenti” /​ “tersi,” “nitide” /​“tranquille,” “profonde” /​“fondi” of the first terzina. The verses are themselves just as tenuous (“debili”) as the images seen, which to Dante-​protagonist seem so insubstantial that he falls into the error opposite to Narcissus’s and takes what are real (they are qualified as “vere sustanze” by Beatrice in verse 29) for mere reflections: tal vid’io più facce a parlar pronte:   per ch’io dentro a l’error contrario corsi   a quel ch’accese amor tra l’omo e ’l fonte. Sùbito sì com’io di lor m’accorsi,   quelle stimando specchiati sembianti,   per veder di cui fosser, li occhi torsi … .

              (III.16–​ 21)

(I saw such multiple faces ready to speak:   for which reason I fell into the error contrary to that   which ignited love between the man and fountain. Suddenly, as soon as I was aware of them,   thinking them to be mirrored semblances,   in order to see who they were, I turned back my eyes … .) Still, Dante is not deceived as to the ethereal nature of these beings, and he learns shortly hereafter that they have shown themselves in the heaven of the moon only for his benefit, while actually they reside continuously in the Empyrean (IV.31–​39). Beyond this reflection in Dante’s experience, the very reality of Paradise in the end turns out to be a kind of reflected image. Virtually all events and encounters which transpire there are compounded of complex mirroring phenomena. Accordingly, the

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328  Reflexive Stylistics words mirror and reflect, or respond antiphonally, to one another, here in lines whose tonic chord is sounded by gutturals plus open vowels—​ “error contrario corsi,” “di lor m’accorsi,” and “veder-​fosser-​torsi”—​ alternating with less sonorous, more clicking and sibillant verses: “tal vid’io più facce,” “quel ch’accese,” “stimando specchiati sembianti.” This is roughly the difference between horns and percussion, and the symphonic effect is integral to Paradiso’s often highly musical style—​a kind of musical mirroring. We can hardly overestimate just how pervasive and important the imagery of mirrors and reflections is to the workings of the Paradiso. It is inextricable from the light and water imagery because water is a reflecting medium, momentously in the Narcissus story. Phenomena of light, moreover, constitute the paradigm on the basis of which all metaphors of reflection are understood. It is possible here to enumerate only a small selection of the instances of Dante’s continual resorting to structures of mirroring at almost every juncture in the exposition of his paradisiacal journey. The first heaven features the three-​mirrors experiment described in II.97–​106 in conjunction with Dante’s wrong explanation of the moon spots. In the last physical heaven, Dante’s first glimpse of divinity as a point of light is mirrored in the eyes of Beatrice: Come in lo specchio fiamma di doppiero   vede colui che se n’alluma retro,   prima che l’abbia in vista o in pensiero, e sé rivolge, per veder se ’l vetro   li dice il vero, e vede ch’el s’accorda   con esso come nota con suo metro, Così la mia memoria si ricorda   ch’io feci, riguardando ne’ belli occhi   onde a pigliarmi fece Amor la corda.

         (XXVIII.4–​ 12)

(As in a mirror the flame of a torch   is seen by one illuminated from behind   before he sees or even thinks of it, and he turns himself to see whether the glass   is telling him the truth and sees that it agrees   as does a musical note with its measure, So my memory recorded   that I did in looking into the beautiful eyes   whence Love made the cord to capture me.) There is, furthermore, the mirroring of the whole creation, past, present, and future, including Dante’s very thoughts, in God—​“the mirror /​in which before you think your thought is displayed” (“lo speglio /​in che

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Epilogue  329 prima che pensi, il pensier pandi,” XV.61). And the blessed themselves are “so many mirrors” (“tanti speculi”) of “the eternal value” (“l’eterno valor,” XXIX.142–​43; cf. also XXX.112–​14)—​like Saint Thomas, who gazing into the eternal light (“riguardando nella luce eternal”), shines with the resplendence of its beam (“del suo raggio resplendo,” XI.19–​21). Beyond multiplication of specific occurrences of this pervasive mirroring-​ of-​ reflections structure, of which we have seen numerous instances, there is also a general sense in which it embraces the whole cantica. Indeed all of the Paradiso is to be understood as the adumbration of Paradise reflected in the poet’s mind (“l’ombra del beato regno /​ segnata nel mio capo …,” I.23–​24). There are constant reminders of this fact (including the passage from Canto XXVIII just cited), which was stated explicitly at the very outset: Veramente quant’io del regno santo   ne la mia mente potei far tesoro,   sarà ora matera del mio canto.

           (I.10–​ 12)

(Truly as much of the holy realm   as I was able to treasure up in my mind   will now be the matter of my song.) The stylistic implications of this fact that Paradiso in its entirety and in its component parts is a reflected image are myriad, but perhaps the most significant of all is this: Dante’s style in treating the realm of God’s illumination aspires to mirror the divine, which is understood as pure form. God is pure form, which is to say pure actuality, according to Aristotle’s Metaphysics and the mediating Arabic and Scholastic traditions. Dante imaginatively expresses this idea in the image of God as pure radiance and shining, which his own poetry then imitates. The delight in sheer form is everywhere to be found in the Paradiso: for example, in articulating the orders of the angels, who are themselves beings consisting in form without matter, and also in formally correlating them with the hierarchical order of the heavens (XXIX.98–​139). Similarly, the structures of arguments become objects worthy of contemplation in their own right, as when Beatrice explains to Dante the exact form of her refutation of his theory of moon spots (II.82–​84). In such cases, structure itself becomes poetic essence. Where the question of form and matter comes up in V.43–54 with regard to religious vows, the upshot is that form is what counts, whereas matter is commutable. In XXIX.22–36, when the creation of pure form, pure matter, and their conjunction is described, the top of the world is reserved for pure forms or “pure act,” that is, the angels (“e quelle furon cima /​nel mondo, in che puro atto fu prodotto”).

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330  Reflexive Stylistics Even just at the terminological level, there is an unmistakable fascination with words of purely structural significance, as in Quelli altri amori che ’ntorno li vonno,   si chiaman Troni del divino aspetto,   per che ’l primo ternaro terminonno.

          (XXVIII.103–​ 5)

(Those other loves that circle around them   are called thrones of the divine   and with them the first triad terminates.) Throughout this cantica we see the pleasure in playing with linguistic form to make new words at its most exuberant. The examples proliferate: “s’imillia,” “s’interna,” “ ‘mparadisa,” “s’invera” (from Canto XXVIII); “s’ingrada” (XXIX), “si trasmoda,” “s’immigli” (XXX), to list the novelties produced by just one of Dante’s favorite types of innovative verbal formations. All are reflexive verbs. Their reflexivity highlights and celebrates pure form. The description of the most heavenly of the heavenly spheres, the Empyrean, uses the reflexive device of beginning each line with the last word of the line preceding (the form of repetition known in rhetoric as “anadiplosis”):   … ciel ch’è pura luce: luce intellettual, piena d’amore;   amor di vero ben, pien di letizia;   letizia che trascende ogni dolzore.

       (XXX.41–​ 42)

   (… the heaven that is pure light, intellectual light, full of love;   love of true good, full of felicity;   felicity that transcends every sweetness.) “Luce,” “amore,” and “letizia” used thus abstractly, without any specifying articles or pronouns, are all Platonic-​like essences. Most often in Paradiso, latinisms and neologisms serve to extricate language from its embodiment in everyday speech, or at least to highlight its formal possibilities of meaning beyond the practical communicative function. Just as the reflection of an object preserves only the form without the matter, so also when Dante recontextualizes familiar words in novel compounds—​for example, “oriafiamma” (XXXIII.127)—​he turns two material elements like gold and flame into an intellectual essence, a new creation existing only in poetry. The strange, often precious or gorgeous and numinous, locution nonetheless has the same transparency that is common to light

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Epilogue  331 or water. The component words are still perfectly visible, but now they are seen as reflected into a rarer linguistic medium created by conscious artistry. The effect is often one of sublimity: La concreata e perpetua sete   del deiforme regno cen portava   veloci quasi come ’l ciel vedete.

          (II.19–​ 21)

(The co-​created and perpetual thirst   for the God-​like kingdom carried us   almost as speedily as the heavens you see.) The magnificence of “concreata” and “deiforme,” which are virtually archetectural constructions in words and which are both introduced by Dante into the vernacular, as well as of “perpetua” from the Latin liturgy, matches the glorious heights of his subject. Moreover, in the first line of this tercet the two adjectival qualifiers transfigure a common bodily need—​thirst—​by their metaphysical resonance. The concepts of creation and eternity that they respectively evoke with their concordant spiritual solemnity turns a physical lack into endless divine desire. We may also observe in the verses mentioning Narcissus previously quoted from Canto III how language becomes progressively rarified by virtue of paraphrastic syntax that avoids naming and delays directly presenting a concrete subject. Although Dante’s reaction is immediate (“Subito”), the very last information given is the act itself (“gli occhi torsi”). First comes the development in highly allusive terms of something less tangible—​his misjudgment. This works together with syntactical inversions such as “a parlar pronte” (“to speak ready”) and “dentro a l’error contrario corsi” (“into the contrary error I ran”) to help keep the sense suspended as long as possible. In the Paradiso, everything is determined by its goal or telos, which in every case is God—​the way an arrow’s trajectory, barring deviation or deflection, is determined by the target at which it is aimed (II.23–​24). These remarks are intended to serve as illustrations of the style and technique Dante forged in order to be able to write about a realm of experience transcending that ordinarily accessible to human beings. All three worlds beyond the tomb, of course, are in this sense transcendent, but Paradise in particular concerns a register of feelings and perceptions that can be reached only in the highest flights of speculative and contemplative spirituality, and only by divine grace. In a substratum consisting of nothing but reflections imaged principally in the elements of water and light, the pure form toward which the poet and every created intelligence aspires can only be dimly shadowed. This rarefied world, in turn, is reflected in a rarefied style often featuring extreme lightness and delicacy

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332  Reflexive Stylistics of images and language, with a constant accent on purely formal qualities, whether of language, logic, or the cosmos. Dante never ceases to remind us of the impossibility of expressing what he has experienced. Yet mirror-​like self-​reflexivity furnishes means of manifesting at least this gap and thereby expressing the transcendence that inhabits the self and cleaves it open to limitless relations with others.

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Postscript on Method From Genealogy to Apophatics

The Table of Contents furnishes a mirror of the book’s arguments and structure, not merely an index to them. Hence its language-​laden, thick descriptions, which reflect the book’s own lyrical texture. The Contents reflect also the book’s method of constant reprise and further elaboration of previous motifs in a spiraling dialectical movement. As a “genealogy,” the work proceeds simultaneously backward and forward in uncovering its own origins in future possibility, as much as in past fact. Recent critique of genealogy, especially from analytic philosophers, concerns its legitimacy as scientific methodology. I  do not engage in these debates but deploy, instead, a hermeneutic conception of truth and knowing appropriate to the humanities. This kind of knowing opens a dimension of truth in experience beyond the reach of factual, objective, scientific analysis. The book does not ascribe to or defend genealogy as a (scientific) method so much as open the poetic space and visionary perspective in which it arises as a necessary complement to more narrowly focused methods aiming at strict objectivity. There have also been questionings of genealogy that do not posit analytic but rather dialectical reason capable of “immanent critique.” My apophatic method embraces and encompasses such forms of critique. Hegelian phenomenological critique and Lacanian psychoanalysis reflecting on the Real have their place here as much as Radical Orthodoxy and its theological genealogy. Being unreservedly self-​critical, apophatics moves fluidly between such alternatives and illuminates how genealogy can communicate with and inflect critical theory and phenomenology. Most importantly, as inclusive of theology, particularly negative theology, my apophatic method turns precisely on “transgression of the discursive.”1 It deploys both “vindicatory” and “unmasking” styles of

1  Ragnar M. Bergem, “On the Persistence of the Genealogical in Contemporary Theology,” Modern Theology 33/​3 (2017): 434–​52. Citation 445.

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334  From Genealogy to Apophatics genealogy, both justifying and exposing myths of origins.2 The apophatic remains receptive to all express positions by (un)positioning itself upstream from them, tapping into their common source. This move through unlimited self-​critique makes continually possible a new setting into perspective of competing alternatives.

2 David Couzens Hoy, “Postscript on Method” to The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 223–​42.

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Index

Abelard, Peter 303 abyss 84, 194 Adorno, Theodor 42, 249; music as non-​representational language 305; negative dialectic 148 Agamben, Giorgio 74, 194; enjambment 240–​41; originary event of language 195–​96 Aimeric de Peguillan 44, 194 Akbari, Suzanne Conklin 88, 100, 285, 292 Al-​Farabi 186, 316 Al-​Ghazali  185 Al-​Hallaj  185 Alanus de Insulis, 56–​57, 214, 303 Albert the Great 121, 122 alchemy, verbal 212 aletheia 75 anadiplosis 322, 330 analogy 135–​36; and dis-​analogy 156; and participation 146; and representation 152; subjective 157–​58, 171 Apel, Karl-​Otto  23 apophasis 25; alternative to modern representation of the transcendent 116; apophatic logic 114; failure of reference 244; as ground of revealed truth 156; as negative dialectic 148 Aquinas, Thomas 14, 121; analogia entis 130; self-​love 231; and Siger de Brabant 306; straw (paglia) 25–​26; synthesis of revelation and science 122 Aristotle 28; Categories, originary articulations of being 195; De Anima, separate intellect 184; metaphysics 129; Nichomachean Ethics, intellectual blessedness 184; rediscovery of 121; specialization

of science 122; Topics 195; words signify thoughts 143 Arnaut Daniel 48, 54, 307–​11 art autonomous yet Other-​oriented  266 Auerbach, Erich 267 Augustine, Saint, 65, 79, 124, 281; image of God in us, 295; intimate self-​knowledge, 313, 317 Austin, J. L. 215 Averroes: unity of intellect 184 Avicenna 124, 184, 316; active intellect 151; being as “first intelligible” 169, 181; “horseness” 132; knowledge interior 184 Babel, fall of language 40 Bacon, Roger 119, 153; words signify directly things 143 Bakhtin, Mikhail 237–​38, 302 Barth, Karl 108 Battaglia, Salvatore 26 Baudelaire, Charles 51, 172, 307 Beatrice, as mediator 15–​16 beauty and truth coalesce 4–​5, 198 being: dependent (creaturely) 13; forgetting of 156–​57; “objective” 151, 153; represented, produced by active intellect, 153; unknowable depth of, 139 Benedict, Saint 11 Benjamin, Walter 24, 42 Benveniste, Émile 28, 195 Bergson, Henri 78 Bernard, Saint: ego affectus est 232, 233; self-​knowledge resembles knowing God 295 Bernard Silvestris 44, 57 Bernart de Ventadorn 45, 60, 290 Bertran del Born 269

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336 Index Bible: Acts 22:6, Paul’s blinding 12; Colossians 1:15, image of invisible God 9, 37, 211; Ecclesiastes 3:11, 189; Genesis 1:10, Creation good 66; James 1:17, no variableness 14; John 1:1–​3, Creation by Word 28, 37, 278; Matthew 22:37–​39, love neighbor as self 246; 2 Thessalonians 2:7, katechon 241 Blake, William 190 Bloch, R. Howard 302–​303 Boccaccio, Giovanni 304 Boethius 214; “know thyself” 115 Böhme, Jakob, ungrunt 41, 82 Bonaventure 183 Bondie Dietaiuti 60–​61 book as totality 281 Booth, Wayne 22 Boulnois, Olivier 117, 211 Brahmanism 164, 176 Buonaiuti, Ernesto 232 Burkhardt, Jakob 28 Burrell, David 111 Caravaggio, Michelangelo da xvii, 51 Cathar heresy 247 Cavalcanti, Guido 316 Celan, Paul 209 Cestaro, Gary 75 Chaucer, Geoffrey 94, 209, 300, 321 Chauvet, Louis-​Marie  216 chiasmus 84–​85 circle: as return upon itself 83; circling reflexivities 80, 217; circulated melody 80, 81 coincidentia oppositorum 25, 206–​207, 299, 306 concept: formation and metaphor 147–​48; of Being as univocal 124; self-​reflexive 119, 124; transcendental 120; transcendental of Being 134–​36 consciousness, of all in all 270 contemplation: as prophetic revelation of all 270; as reflexive concentration 82; as self-​reflective speculation 270; vs. speculation 183 Contini, Gianfranco 309 Convivio: I.v.7, stability of poetic language 17; II.iv.10–​13, contemplative life 183; III, IV.ii, philosophy as self-​reflection 24; IV.vi.3–​4, tying into verse 17; IV. vi.4, ring of vowels 83–​84; IV. vi.3–​4, “legare parole” 280; IV.xix,

productivity of embodiment 90; IV. xix.6, human nobility above angelic 182; IV.xx–​xxi, felicità mentale 183–​84; IV.xxi, man almost another incarnate God 90, 268; IV.xxii.8, all love from self-​love 231, 268; IV. xxx.6, perfection of wisdom 277 Courtine, François 125 courtly quest as Christian spiritual journey 295 Creation: all created being reflects God 88–​90, 223; discursive 205; our being created 177; self-​reflexive 35–​36, 65, 205, 217 Croce, Benedetto 256 Cross 85 Cusa, Nicholas of 10, 190; conjecture, 157; De docta ignorantia 25, 116, 252; mirror of eternity 275 Damascene, John of 14 Damiani, Pier 29, 81–​82 De vulgari eloquentia 57–​58; canzone self-​sufficient 281–​82, 311; avieo, -​ere (“to bind”) 280; God simple, One 73, 88; language “falls into silence” 242–​43; panther 219; poets “beloved of God” 309–​10; primiloquium 65, 205, 213; reason differentiates individuals 316–​17; “rhetorical fiction made with music” 305; sign defined 237; speech as communication of thought 277; technique and craft indispensable 310–​11; tying 17; vulgare illustre 73 death: in lyric reflexivity 51; mystic 290 defamiliarization 235 degrees of reality 10, 129–​30 Deleuze, Gilles 126, 212, 244 Derrida, Jacques 53, 274; and postmodern thought, 109; critique of modern thought, 112; critique of self-​reflexivity, 113–​14; right to Narcissism, 233 Descartes, René; classical epistemé 152–​53; cogito 107, 110–​11, 163; founds philosophy on self-​reflective subject 109, 118; methodological doubt 22; reflection self-​grounding  261 Deschamps, Eustache, 305 desire: self-​engendering 108; self-​fulfilling 76–​77, 100

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Index  337 difference; disappearing 13 digitalization 141 Dionysius the Areopagite 111–​12, 144, 146; and dis-​analogy 156 Divine Names 128; abandoned as way of knowing 144–​45 Dragonetti, Roger 44, 83 Echo 82, 96 Eckhart, Meister 25; analogy subjective 157; ambiguity of subjectivity 198 Eco, Umberto 26, 315 Eden, Garden of 97, 101 Eliot, T. S. 244, 307 Empyrean, outside space 11 encyclopedia 83, 262; of different disciplines 122 epistemological reduction 138 epistemological turn 123, 140–​42 esoterism 315 existential: expression in metaphor 171; relation 150, 158; revelation 156 expression, causally grounded 212 faith 40, 178–​79; definition of 74; necessary to philosophy 111 Ferrante, Joan 14 Feuerbach, Ludwig 108 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 162–​68; and bourgeois liberalism 162; apophatic inconceivability of God 165; “I” unmediated by self-​ reflection 162; “I” unconditional 162; “I” foundation of religion and revelation,163; knowledge revelatory 165; mystical wisdom 166; reverses philosophy of self-​ reflection 165; transcendental critique 166; unlimited individual emancipation 164 fideism 136, 150, 173 Fiedler, Leslie 309 Flamenca (Occitanean) 47 form: imitates the formless 179, 209; its own content 41, 140–​41 formal being 130–​31, 141 formal distinction: produced by reflection 131–​33 formal method 137–​38 formalism 234, 237, 308 Franciscan: pathbreakers of modernity 141; Scholasticism 125 Frank, Manfred 165

Freccero, John 305 Friedrich, Hugo 318 freedom; absolute 161–​62; as realization of infinite 267; of subject 141 Foucault, Michel 153 Francis, Saint, “Canticle of the Sun” 36 Freud, Sigmund 49, 293 Gadamer, Hans-​Georg  272–​74 Gasché, Rodolphe 113 gaya scienza 270 Geoffrey of Vinsauf 65, 200–​2002; rhetoric of novelty 201; speculum reveals alterity 201; transumptio a mirror for self-​reflection 201 Gide, André 203 Gilson, Étienne 117, 125 Gioacchino da Fiore 232 Gnosticism 39, 97, 116, 243, 247 God: as abyss 39–​40; as infinite intensity of being 129; as Narcissist 9, 58, 101–​2; as Nothing 39–​40; as pure form 329 Goldin, Frederick 46–​47, 319 Good: rational desire for 149; vs. Being as divine Name, 146 Grassi, Ernesto 21, 23 gryphon 77, 100 Guilhem de Peitieus 43–​49; see also William of Poitiers Guilhem Molinier, Leys d’Amors 302 Guillaume d’Auvergne 125 Guillaume de Lorris 54, 58, 291, 303; fecund narcissism 58 Guillaume de Machaut 305 Guinizzelli, Guido 71 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 214 Habermas, Jürgen 134 Hamann, Johann Georg 166, 168 Hamlet 190 Hart, David Bentley 111 Hegel, G. W. F.: absolute knowing 107; absolute reflection 244; Christian Trinitarian model 108; cunning of reason 248; master-​slave dialectic 51; philosophy of human spirit 255–​56; Science of Logic 28; speculative thought/​proposition 272–​74; system and whole 150, 276–​77; Trieb 207 Heidegger, Martin 21; aletheia 75; language as “unifying-​gathering”

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338 Index 280–​81; “language speaks” 278; Logos preconditions history 281; metaphysics as forgetting of being 135; “origin of the work of art” 281; repetition 216; reverses modern subject-​grounded thought 109; thesis on Scotus 135; unconcealment 282, 289–​92; “undergo an experience with language” 277 Henrich, Dieter 164 Henry of Ghent 117, 153; general ontological analogy 169–​70 Hoff, Johannes 152 Hölderlin, Friedrich 166 Hollander, Robert 80 Holy Spirit 93; feminine 9; procession of 83 Honnefelder, Ludger; interdisciplinarity 121; underived freedom 161 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, “Windhover” 61 Horkheimer, Max 249 Humanism 199, 265; Italian 260, 304; language 23, 198; Renaissance 23, 271; Socratic 189 humanities studies 27, 150; all disciplines without limit 264; founding charter: “know thyself” 189, 317; and self-​reflective persons 247–​49 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 21 Husserl, Edmund 113; intensional content 134; phenomenological method 137; presuppositionless philosophy 107 Ibn Arabi 186 Idealism, German 69, 161, 167, 169, 271 image: as true repetition of real 211–​12; orients self to ideal 297–​99 imagination: its process reveal divinity 154–​55 immanence: absolute and apophatic 244–​45; turned toward transcendence 72–​73, 204 immediacy 269–​70; of contact with absolute reality, 270; of self-​reflection  270 incarnation 31; its kenotic logic 25; exposes self-​reflection to other 90; as origin of science and fiction 202 incommensurability 155

ineffability 276–​77, 282–​84; and lyricism 26; as foundational motif 26; topos 6 in-​fans 75, 230; fante 229–​31 Inferno: I.22–​24, shipwreck 325; I.37–​42, repeating time of Creation 74, 217; XXX.128, mirror of Narcissus 97–​98, 289; XXVI.125, Ulysses 120, 198, 301, 320 infinite: conceived determinately through finite 272; dependence of finite on 176; disentangled from finite 127–​28; refracted in finite 10 intensional being 130–​31 Islamic philosophy 183–​86; absolute knowing through self-​reflection 186; knowing intellectually 185–​86, 216; of imagination 186 Jakobson, Roman 7, 16, 235, 240 Jaufré Rudel 45; “love from afar” 45 Jean de Meung 58, 303 John of Salisbury 321 Joyce, James 51 Justice 65 Kabbalah 23 Kant, Immanuel 118, 131; appearances vs. things themselves 137; concepts vs. percepts 136; good will autonomous 149; pure concepts 133; thing-​in-​itself 126; transcendental apperception 162; transcendental deduction 125 Kay, Tristan 295–​96 Kermode, Frank 114 Kierkegaard, Søren 115, 274; Knight of Faith 316; repetition 215–​16; subjectivity 150 Klee, Paul 203 Koyré, Alexandre 202 Kristeva, Julia; 15–​16, 49–​50, 54, 232–​33, 297–​98, 307; birth of autoreflexive subject from narcissism 319–​20 Lacan, Jacques 229, 333; mirror stage 292; “objet petit ‘a’ ” 50; “pas-​tout” 68; pre-​symbolic  229 language: as absolute 96; analogous to divinity 21; as divine gift 148; emulates divine Word 40; experience of 280; its failure 39, 243; generates time 79; infantile regression 229 319; its limits 26;

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Index  339 makes real 95; mirrors whole of reality 273–​74; mysticism 68, 235; ontological event of 194, 199; origin of 218–​19; performative 215; poetic function of 7, 42; as presence 8, 68; as pure form 330; its rarefaction 331–​32; reference short-​circuited, 237; as revelation of being 25, 31, 195, 237, 278; as self-​disclosure of being 225; social production of 238; self-​referentiality of 7, 27–​28; as theological revelation 30 lark 26, 59–​64 Latini, Brunetto 72 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 125–​26, 251 Lentini, Giacomo 314 Letter to Can Grande 11–​12 Leupin, Alexandre 200–​202 Levinas, Emmanuel 23–​24; transcendence of ethical Other 109; negative dialectic 148 limits, thinking one’s own 189–​90, 254 Lotman, Juri 314–​15 Löwith, Karl 256 love: absoluteness of 296; as agape 81, 232; autoerotic 297–​98; courtly, narcissistic 50; eros and transcendence 296, 318; eros interiorized 318; self-​reflective, inner tear open to alterity 233; self-​love 231, 246, 297; self-​reflexive in lyric 43–​44; sensual vs. spiritual 44–​45; Trinitarian self-​love 223–​224 Lubac, Henri de 149 lyric 3; destruction of language 209; envisages whole truth 167; incarnational 30–​31; as language enamored of itself 42–​43, 73; and lived time 78; as revelation of divinity 91–​92, 304–​05; its musicality 4–​5, 304–​05; opens to Other and Unsayable 206–​207; oriented to transcendent Other 210; rapture weds wisdom 306; repetition, non-​identical 3–​4, 15, 302; as self-​manifestation 225; as self-​reflexive 27, 30, 38, 42, 64, 206, 301; springs from subject 206; subversion of the proper 301–​303; subverts epic linearity

302; Trinitarian-​reflexive 30–​31, 223–​224, 302; and turning 31 Maimonides, Moses 25 Mallarmé, Stéphane 51, 145, 172, 203, 209; “Orphic explanation of the earth” 305 Marguerite Porete 246 Marie de France, Le lais de Narcisse 290 Marion, Jean-Luc 125 Marquet, Jean-François 315 Martha and Mary 99 Marx and Engels 250 Mathelda 306 McLeish, Archibald 7 McLuhan, Marshall 279; medium itself means 279 Meninas, Las 274 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice  24 metaphor 11; absolute 12; metaphoricity of language 20; as method of revelation, 140–​41; reflects wholeness relation within world, 264; secularizes contemplation of God, 173; subjective, 15 metaphysics: Christian 13; decline into forgetting being 118; dimension of otherness 151; modern, founded on self-​reflection 118; ontological science vs. theological wisdom 140; scientifically progressive 118; shift to subject-​centered 117–​18; special vs. general 117, 129; speculative 272; Thomas’s vs. Scotus’s 135; as transcendental science 140 Metchthilde, of Magdeburg 246 method: apophatic 333–​34; genealogy 333; immanent critique 333; self-​critical 193, 251, 333; spiraling dialectic 333 Michaut, Henri 305 Milbank, John 118, 147 Milton, John 71; happy fall 208 mirroring 272, 314–​15, 327–​38; infinitizes 243, 272–​73; universalizes 222 modernity: alternative 192; secular 192–​93 Moevs, Christian 52, 101, 164–​65, 268, 270, 283, 296 Monarchia, two-​truths  158 Montaigne, Michel de 116 Montani, Pietro 234–​35

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340 Index mother bird 70–​74 music as absolute expression 42, 304–​05 mysticism 54–​55, 251–​52; impedes science 175–​76; linguistic 68 narcissism 49–​51; of lyric 96; and mystic death 52; objectless 293; primary 49–​50, 292–​93; regression to oral stage 231; risks and pitfalls 321; Romantic revaluations 97; unifying structure of subject’s world 292–​94 Narcissus 8–​10, 327–​28; Caravaggio’s xvii 51; contrary error, 9; founding myth of West 289; God as 9; Lai de Narcisus 97; Ovid’s 96–​97; Ovide moralisé 97; redeemed 9, 91, 101–​3, 299, 321–​23; as reduction of all to self 96 nature: not mastered 249–​50; no science of 253 negative dialectic 148 negative poetics 206 negative theology 73, 116, 252, 261, 269; absorbs limits of knowing 178; as deconstruction 114; its paradoxes 144–​45; productively unknowing knowing 178; in Scotus and Kant 119, 126; as self-​critical self-​reflection 193, 251 Neoplatonism 54, 296–​98; mystical ascent to One 128; procession and return 83, 301 Nietzsche, Friedrich 20, 42, 270; eternal return of unique 216 nominalism 94, 135, 141 Novalis 165 Nyssa, Gregory of 110; epektasis 77 Ockham, William of 119, 131, 135; Ockham’s razor 141 Odysseus; anti-​Narcissus 301, 320; archetype of self-​restraint 249; contrast with Latin Ulysses 301, 320 ontological mystery 127, 137, 142, 157; impedes science 175–​76 onto-​theology 117, 134–​36 Oppenheimer, Paul 313 Orpheus 304–​05 Other: acknowledged 176; evoked self-​reflexively 67; extolled 56; ineffable 30, 266; relation to

176; transcendent 16; within Godhead, 39 Paradiso: I.4–​12, necessary forgetting 157, 329; I.16–​18, two peaks of Parnassus 324; I.19–​21, Marsyas 299; I.49–​54, reflected ray, return home 221; I.58–​63, specular doubling, 221; I.67–​70 Glaucus 221; I.70, trasumanar 15, 283; I.79–​81, light and water coalesce 325; I.103–​5, universal order resembles God 221; I.113, sea of being 14, 303, 325; II.7–​9, invocation of Apollo and Muse 324; II.13–​15, navigation metaphor 325 ; II.19–​21, concreata and deiforme 331; II.23–​24, trajectory determined by telos 331; III.10–​15, images true substance, 9–​10, 326–​27; III.16–​21, Narcissus 265, 298, 327 ; III.44–​45, Creation like himself 58; III.86, God as sea 325; IV.28–​48, accommodation 11–​12, 15, 158; V.122–​23, “dii” 14; V.133–​39, sight blinding 12; VI, sacrosanto segno, Roman history 224; VII.64–​66, divine bounty spurns envy 265; X.1–​6, “Looking at his Son with Love” 35, 224; X.34–​36, preconscious 71; X.37–​39, no time span 78; XII.5–​6, reduplication of circle 221; XII.13–​15, Echo 82; XIII.25–​27, three persons 31; XIII.37–​51, contradictories coincide in center 306; XIII.52–​60, Creation 223; XIV.28–​29, chiasmus 84; XIV.61–​66, longing for bodies 230; XV.83, disaggualianza 148, 156; XVII.139, “pur rimanendo in sé uno” 281; XVIII.70–​126, DILIGITE 38, 236; XVIII.109–​111, esso guida, “it guides”; XIX.34–​39, falcon simile 63, 64–​65; XIX.43–​45, Verbum’s infinite excess 52, 67; XIX.51, God self-​measuring 62, 282; XIX.86–​87, God good in himself 282; XIX.115–​39, LUE 237; XX.16–​30, synaesthesia 172; XX.77, “eternal pleasure” 305; XX.73–​78, lark 26, 45, 59–​64; XX.118–​20, amazing grace 63; XXI.16–​17, eyes as mirrors 275; XXI.83–​87, Damiani 82;

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Index  341 XXIII.1–​9, mother bird simile 71–​74; XXIII.43–​44, self-​transcendence 76; XXIII.61–​62, sacred poem jumps 80; XXIII.73–​75, rose of Word 81; XXIII.103–​5, angelic love 81; XXIII.109, “circulata melodia” 80–​81, 322; XXIII.121–​23, speech feeds 75; XXIV.1–​6, “O” 231; XIV–​XVIII, autobiography, Cacciaguida 267; XXV.5, “O” 231; XXVI.17, alpha and omega 170; XXVI.97–​102, Adam as animal 191; XXVI. 131–​32, human fashioning of language 218; XXVII.82–​83, “mad crossing of Ulysses” 320; XXVII.88–​89, “mind in love” 276; XXVII.118–​19, time’s roots 280; XXVIII.4–​12, God reflected as point of light 88, 328; XXVIII.136, Mathelda 306; XXIX.13–​21, self-​reflection engenders other loves, Subsisto 94, 204–​205; XXIX.22, pure form created 329; XXIX.70–​81, angels without memory 181; XXIX.94–​126, against vain appropriation of Scripture 173–​74; XXX.12, inverted image of angelic orders 88; XXX.38–​42, Empyrean 306, 322, 330; XXX.49–​57, circunfulse 12; XXX.78, “shadowy prefaces” 12, 322; XXX.82–​84, infant at mother’s breast 52; XXX.85, mirroring eternity 275; XXX.100–​108, Empyrean circular light 87; XXX.109–​14, blessed narcissistically mirror God 102, 321; XXX–​XXXII, celestial rose 58; XXXI.48–​49, faces seen 89; XXXI.52–​60, “casual punto” 209; XXXI.83–​87, Damiani 29; XXXII.94–​97, angel Gabriel’s divina cantilena 322; XXXIII.85–​87, “bound by love in one volume” 274; XXXIII.94–​96, letargo 157, 325; XXXIII.106–​8, infantile regression 50, 229; XXXIII.124–​26, God’s self-​reflexivity 86, 102; XXXIII.127, oriafiamma 330; XXXIII.115–​32, God revealed in our effigy 30, 87, 90, 295; XXXIII.133–​35, square circle 160; XXXIII.139, winged ascent to God 320 Pascal, Blaise 125, 243 Paul, Saint 74; his blinding 12

Paz, Octavio 312–​13 Peirce, Charles Sanders 26; common natures 133 Petrarch, Francesco 198 phenomenology: phenomenological reduction 138; theological turn in 17, 138 philosophy: critical 140, 158; modern founding on reflective subject 109; modern project: self-​reflexive grounding 107, 109; postmodern orients reflection to transcendence 109; self-​grounding autonomy 107 Piccarda 14, 63 Pickstock, Catherine 118, 216 Pico della Mirandola 304–​05 Platcher, William 112 Plotinus 125, 297–​99; imitation of divine self-​relatedness 298; One’s self-​love  297 Plutarch 281 poetic; function 234, 240; logic 21 poetics: formalist 16–​19; hyper-​realist 16; of ineffability 39; Inferno III, realistic 5; Paradiso III, lyrical 6–​8; Purgatorio II, allegorical 5–​6 poetry: anticipates philosophy 109, 198; of formal play 45; as hermeneutic of Orphic wisdom 305; modern, formal 172, 313–​14; poésie pure 203; as revelation of higher truth 304; and technique 307–​10 possibility: conditions actuality 180; determinate vs. indeterminate actuality 180–​81; produced by reflection 180; self-​reflexively created 182; as virtual realm 180 Poulet, Georges 317 Pound, Ezra 48, 199, 294, 307 presence: divine 8, 16; of divinity in language 68; pure, performed by language 8; real 10, 15, 73, 213, 266 property, fiction of 94 psychoanalysis 50, 69, 233, 298, 333 Purgatorio: I.1–​3, navigation metaphor 325; I.7, poetry resurrected, 238; I.113, “com altrui piacque” 198, 301; VIII.100–​102, beast sleeks itself 97; IX.94–​96, self-​ examination 98; XXI.40–​72, order without contingency 209; XXI.85,

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342 Index name of poet 17; XXIV, poetic inspiration, 93; XXIV.52–​54, Bonagiunta, inspiration of poetry 219; XXV.61–​75, fante 230; XXV.75, sé in sé rigira 267; XXVI.118, miglior fabbro 48, 307; XXVII.100–​108, Rachel and Leah 99, 102, 190; XXVII.142, “crown and mitre” 167; XXVIII.40–​41 and XXIX.4–​9, Mathelda 100; XXIX.67–​69, self-​mirroring 98; XXX.22–​33, Beatrice’s veils 283; XXX.76–​79, redemption from narcissism 98, 101; XXXI.118–​23, gryphon 77, 100, 275; XXXI.129, satisfied thirsting 77; XXXII.59–​60, Tree of Life 85; XXXII.106–​XXXIII.78 apocalypse; XXVIII–​XXXIII, revealing as re-​veiling  283 Putallaz, François-​Xavier  117 Radical Orthodoxy 118, 147, 333 Raimbaut of Orange, “Escotatz mas no say que s’es” 44 reality: higher, of Paradise,17; discerned by formal distinctions 18; discerned self-​reflexively 19; exchanged for representation 146; itself without distinctions 18; made present self-​reflexively 56; substantial 18; vs. representation 211 referentiality: broken open to infinite abyss of being 238–​39; erased through lyric 17; projected from sense 278; second-​order 73; to higher order, 18–​19 repetition 3: accesses unrepresentable sacred Source 216–​17, 225–​26; as condition of intelligibility 20; existential 216; present actuality of past 215; as primary linguistic function 213; as productive speculative mirroring 221–​22; reactualizes origin 218; realizes divinity 160 representation: dichotomy with real suspended 10; mendaciously subjective representation 173–​74; mental reproduction of object 153–​54; metaphorical, not univocal 154; modern paradigm of 151–​52; produced by active intellect 153; pure 143, 238; as

representation 173; and revelation 153; as sphere of autonomy 160; substituted for reality 146; and the unrepresentable 39 revelation: linguistically mediated 146–​47; mediated by imagination 156; paradigm of representational knowledge 153; prophetic 156; subjectively mediated 157 rhetoric 20–​24; and humanism 23; of inquiry 22; new 22 Richard of St. Victor 54, 183 Ricoeur, Paul 112 Rilke, Rainer Maria 191, 305–​06 Rimbaud, Arthur 13, 145, 209, 212, 235–​36, 305 rime petrose (stony rhymes) 307 Roman de la rose 58, 65, 102; Fountain of Narcissus 291 Rosenzweig, Franz 23, 190 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques 97, 166 Rudel, Jauffré 293 Russian formalism 234, 237 Salomé, Lou-​Andréas  97 Saussure, Ferdinand de 7, 234 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 167–​68, 281 Schiller, Friedrich 282 Schlegel, Friedrich 165, 167 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 163 Schlovsky, Victor 235 Schopenhauer, Arthur 42 science: born with Incarnation 202; modern, post-​metaphysical 134; only of humanity not nature 253; severed from theology 147–​48; secular 121; specialized 122 Scotus, John Duns 10, 19; age of 117; formal method 137; haecceitas 147; metaphysical realist 151; Negatione summe non amamus 178; pure representation 143; secular thinking 119; signifying God 143–​44; transcendental metaphysics 135–​36; will as self-​determination 160–​61 secularism 121, 143; autonomous creative realm,158; coincides with sacred 255–​56; and immanence 244; religiously inspired 266–​67; theologically motivated 171 self: as relation to transcendent divinity 267; as revelation of God 268; fiction of autonomy 93–​94; mystic-​realistic  268–​69

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Index  343 self-​affection  173 self-​consciousness: personal, existential first in Christianity 317; theological origins 317–​18 self-​reflection 3; ambiguity of 191–​92, 198, 246–​52; autonomy 143; creates relation to transcendent 173; deconstructs self, sees whole 243, 250; as exercise in dying 191; force of 249; idealizing, universalizing 294–​96, 303; makes monadic whole, totality 243; ontologically productive 221; opens to Other 192–​93, 250–​52, 299–​300, 317–​18; and repetition 21; in science and imagination 158; as self-​critical, 251; self-​negating 190–​92, 251–​52, 262; as self-​relativization 189–​90; its technological perversion 103, 247–​52; theological underpinnings 108, 317–​18; underlies concepts of humanity and divinity 108; as unlimited consciousness 270; vs. immediate angelic cognition 182 self-​reflexivity: creates substance 75–​76, 86–​90; and difference 15; discovery by Troubadours 49; its dynamism 73; fecund 82; figures the unrepresentable 67, 251; of language 3, 20, 37–​41, 91–​92, 312–​13; of language and divinity alike 21; logic of 83; makes real by mirroring 65; and modernity 27, 192, 251, 312–​13; other-​inspired, 65; power through repetitive, mechanical 247–​49; and presence 7; reflection of Source 218–​19, 299; reflection of transcendence 67–​68, 93, 210, 252, 265, 313; revelation of otherness 67; its theological presuppositions 27; as theological revelation 27; Trinitarian and Incarnational 93, 224, 298 self-​transcendence 94, 204, 243; toward Other 82, 127–​28; toward transcendent divinity 243, 252, 264 Sells, Michael 244 semiology 26; medieval 7 senses, spiritual 73 sestina 48–​49, 242; “Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra” 308–​09 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 45, 60 sign: aesthetic self-​reference 234–​35; diacritical 234; as mirror 314–​15; substantial reality of 9–​10, 223

silence 25–​26, 84, 234; as destination of lyric 30; fulfilment of song 64 Singleton, Charles 267 skylark 45, 70 Socrates 115–​16, 189, 252, 261 Sollers, Philippe 281 sonnet as self-​reflexive matrix 313 speculation vs. contemplation 183 speculative: dimension of language 273; proposition 273; thinking 273 Spinoza, Baruch 125–​26, 146, 177, 212 Steiner, George 208 Stevens, Wallace 303 Stierle, Karlheinz 79, 241, 303 Stone, Gregory 196 Suárez, Francisco 117, 147, 154 subjectivity 150; becomes key to universal analogy 172; constituted by reflective self-​awareness 247–​48; generates value 176; self-​reflexively constructed 172; as unifying principle 291–​92 Suhrawardi 186 surrealism 305 syntax: synthetic unity of 79; transsyntactical semantics 241 technique and inspiration one 309–​10 technology 209; as self-​reflexive empowerment 251–​52; undermines authentic self-​reflection  190 terza rima 207 theology: apophatic 155; and Dante 27; and fideism 119; as God’s self-​ knowing 154–​55; mystical 54–​55; repressed model of autonomous self-​reflection 107, 109–​10; relational transcendence of Subject 111–​12; rooted in ignorance 259 theory/​practice split 120, 126–​28; healed by Hegel 255–​56 Thomas of Erfurt 135 “thou art that” 164 time: anticipates eternity 74, 76–​79; Christian 74; of Creation repeated 74; lived in lyric 78; self-​abandon of vernacular to 217; transcended through language 280 trace of real presence 15, 18 transcendence 30; related to via self-​reflection  173 transcendental reflection 127, 193, 268–​69

43

344 Index transcendentals 39, 119; new metaphysics of 133; replace Divine Names 144 transhumanizing 101, 221, 252, 283 Tree of Life 85 Trinity 3, 35, 79, 86–​87, 301; abyss within Godhead 39; gap between persons 39; ineffable origin of language 219–​20; model of self-​relation 107; Narcissist 9; self-​reflexive 26, 28, 31 Troubadour lyric: anonymous and universal 196; awakens to modern self-​reflection 108; discovery of reflexivity 49; joy of singing 45, 57; performance 46–​47; poetry of ontological void 43–​44; and popular culture 47; as objectless desire 44–​45; razos and vidas 196; tenso on nothingness 44, 194; transcendence 46–​48; voiding of referentiality 46 Trouvère, circle of song 53–​55 truth: approached via semblance 266; revealed in its wholeness 166, 264 Turner, Denys 179 univocity: of being 123, 130; of concepts 128–​29, 173; makes beings accessible to concepts 175–​76 unrepresentable, the: allegorical, symbolist poetics of 283; figured self-​reflexively  67 Valéry, Paul 172, 203 veil: in Earthly Paradise 283–​85; of Isis 282; reveals as hidden 279; tutelage of 284 Velazquez, Diego 274 Venard, Olivier-​Thomas  111 verse form: line break makes it self-​ reflective 240–​41; non-​coincidence of sound and sense 240; “versus” a turning 31 Vico, Giambattista 10, 252–​64; cyclical return to barbarism 263–​64; divine providence 256;

eternal ideal history 259; facts illuminated by infinite 260; heroic mind 264; priority of unknowing 254; recollective memory” 257–​58, 261–​62; science of humanity not nature 253–​54; self-​reflection through history 260; theological-​ anthropological imagination 257–​59; unlimited relation with unknown 260–​61; verum-​factum principle 21, 253–​54; wisdom of self-​reflection  254–​55 Vidal, Raimon 196, 305 Vita nuova: II.1, “glorious lady of my mind” 276; XVIII–​XIX, poetics of praise 49, 64, 293, 318; XX, love one with noble heart 293; XLII, oriented to Other; autobiographical, 204; lyric universal and personal 197; as precedent 56; as self-​profiling  28 vows 14 Wahl, Jean 313 Webb, Heather 296 Wellbery, David 318–​19 whole: produced by reflection 68–​69; as unlimited Other 70; ungraspable 264, 276–​77 will: free only if universal 176; good will self-​reflexively produced 149; origin of good 149, 161; as self-​determination 160; severed from reason 149 William of Poitiers 43–​49; craftsmanship 48; dreyt nien 43–​44; first to write songs 46; poetry of formal play 44–​45; usurps clerical privilege 48; see also Guilhem de Peitieus William of St. Thierry 54 Williams, William Carlos 294 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 21, 215 Word, by whom all was made 37–​38 world, given in language 21 Zumthor, Paul 53–​54