The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy (review)

Having for a long time insisted on a newly "mystical," as well as a radically contemporary, reading of Dante's Commedia, this reviewer cannot but deeply appreciate Moev's intelligent and well-written book, which addresses the question of the "truth" of the poem, and solves it by pointing in the direction of "self-knowledge, the self-experience of what is" (9). In other words, the poem represents "how . . . the human soul or intelligence comes to experience itself as divine, all-encompassing, and (one with) the ultimate principle of all being" (58). At a time when reading the Commedia as a "mystical" project is considered by much of Dante criticism as, at best, harmlessly eccentric, this book, in its meticulous use of metaphysical categories, might persuade skeptical medievalists that a lot can be gained by exploring both classic literary texts, and perhaps the entire philosophical tradition, from this perspective.

To illustrate how the immensely complex text of the Commedia is organized around the ultimate goal of "divine" self-knowledge, Moevs, relying on a tradition that has its roots in classical antiquity, turns to the cosmological make-up of the poet's universe. The Empyrean, which is the last stop of pilgrim Dante, is the Christian addition to the nine Aristotelian-Ptolemaic concentric spheres of which the universe is comprised, and in the Commedia it represents an "absolutely immaterial and uncreated" quid, the ground of being, the divine mind itself (21). Moevs concentrates on the so-called Primo Mobile, or the ninth of the concentric spheres of the universe, seeing it as the intermediary between the contingent and the absolute, between dispersion and unity: "The Primo Mobile embodies an apparent metaphysical paradox: it is self-sufficient divine awareness and power projected into pure motion and desire, and material reality become featureless extension . . . and exalted, living potentiality" (38).

To see this sphere as one of the avatars of the Platonic world's soul is certainly a wonderful acquisition, although at times Moevs' wording suggests an uneasy shifting of registers from the metaphorical/textual to the "metaphysical": "without the nexus or bridge of the Primo Mobile, there could be no "transhumanizing" (trasumanar), no Incarnation, no revelation, no redemption, no journey . . . no translation of being into contingent or finite experience, and hence no space-time and no Comedy" (8). Is this simply a general reflection on the ultimate necessity of a divine world? Or does this mean that the peculiar construct that pre-exists the text of the Commedia is what makes the poem possible? Or that 'Primo Mobile' is the poet's own chosen metaphor for the balancing of the finite into the infinite? Is this particular notion centrally important in the poetics of the Commedia? After all, Dante has been trying to define 'deification' all along, from the Vita nuova to the great canzoni to the Convivio. There is one much more visible figure which is invested with "translation of being into contingent or finite experience," or with significance as "intermediary": the word 'trasumanar' appears in Paradiso 1, where the passing from human to divine is empowered by Beatrice.

In his definition of 'experience of the divine,' Moevs insists on distinguishing "pagan" from "Christian" Neoplatonism. A generic Neoplatonic One, described as "above being or existence in any sense, and therefore above the divine mind," is thus opposed to a "Christian thought, both Augustinian and Aristotelian," which "tends to identify the divine mind with pure being" (33). One could perhaps observe that the "above" of, say, Plotinus, can only be seen as pointing to the irreducibility of language to no-thing; as for Christian thought, one would have to forget the gospel of John, and its Word become flesh.

From the same "christianizing" perspective, the book insists, a lot more than the Commedia itself, on the sacrificial aspect of salvation: "love is the universal form of the 'knot' that writes and binds the scattered pages of...