Double Authorship: Prophetic and Poetic Inspiration in Dante's Paradise

Abstract

As a completion of salvation history, Dante's Commedia conceives its author as a prophetic writer, who strives to communicate his divinely inspired vision of the afterworld and his knowledge of the last and ultimate things by performing an anti-Thomist revaluation of poesia. This strategy however does not lead to an absorption of the secular poetic mode by prophetically inspired speech. On the contrary, it cannot but create heavy tensions between the two poles, resulting unexpectedly in a promotion of poesia as a testimony of secular authorial exceptionality and worldly fame. This becomes especially obvious in the Paradiso, which constitutes the focus of the textual analysis of this article.

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