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  • La philosophie de la lumière chez Dante: Du Convivio à la Divine comédie
  • Steven Botterill
Didier Ottaviani . La philosophie de la lumière chez Dante: Du Convivio à la Divine comédie. Études et Essais sur la Renaissance 56. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2004. 477 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. €88. ISBN: 2-7453-1012-7.

Anyone bold enough to give a book the subtitle borne by this one must be prepared to reckon with the formidable shade of Bruno Nardi, whose Dal "Convivio" alla "Commedia" (1960) was perhaps the most prominent landmark in [End Page 1290] a career magisterially dedicated to exploring the philosophical matrix from which Dante's extraordinary contributions to literature emerged. Whether conscious of it or not, Ottaviani rises to this challenge; in depth and erudition his study is more than worthy to stand alongside those of his great predecessor. In other ways, however, it shares some of the deficiencies of the distinguished lineage from which it springs.

Ottaviani's inquiry into Dante's philosophy of light is encyclopedic in scope and exhaustive in detail. Beginning with astronomy as he studies Dante's depiction of the Empyrean in its cosmological context, he goes on to examine the poet-philosopher's metaphysics of light (with ample reference to pseudo-Dionysius and Robert Grosseteste); his conception of light's materiality (drawing on the Aristotelian tradition and commentators such as Avicenna and Avicebron); and his treatment of related questions such as the nature and function of the human soul, the theory of vision, the relationship between knowledge ("illumination") and love, the significance of happiness and nobility, and, finally, Dante's theory of language, in which "la parole [est] entendue comme lumière subtile et invisible" (411), making linguistic theory another branch of metaphysics. By the end of this lengthy book, author and reader have ranged together far and wide through the rustling undergrowth of medieval philosophy and have encountered there a vast diversity of thinkers and concepts — though not all of these, it must be said, seem always to point as clearly as they might toward the journey's ostensible destination: a better understanding of Dante's thought and poetry.

Awestruck as one well may be by the amount of effort lavished on this project and the meticulous care with which Ottaviani has constructed his argument — both ways in which the example of Nardi must, again, have been fruitful — doubt may still arise about the value of the project's outcome in its present form. First, this book is far too long: too much time is spent rehearsing relatively familiar aspects of medieval thought and its historical development, and the argument ventures at times into territory (most notably that of linguistic theory) where Ottaviani does not manage to convince us of its relevance to Dante's philosophy of light as such. Greater willingness to let go of some of what the author brought back from his researches would have made for a better book.

Second, Ottaviani's relentless concentration on the substance of Dante's thought in its medieval context obscures that scarcely anyone today reads Dante purely as a thinker; for ninety-nine out of a hundred modern readers, surely, the interest of Dante's ideas inevitably depends on their involvement in the creation of his poetry — and on this Ottaviani has virtually nothing to say. Models do exist — Patrick Boyde's great trilogy of studies is one — of ways in which discussion of Dante's ideas can be brought into fertile juxtaposition with an analysis of his poetry as their indispensable (not merely formal) embodiment; but while one of Boyde's books has found its way into Ottaviani's bibliography, he seems not to have profited by its example. And this instance, perhaps trivial in itself, reveals another serious flaw in Ottaviani's approach. Boyde's Dante Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos is cited in its Italian translation; [End Page 1291] and it soon becomes clear that, with few exceptions, the scholarship with which Ottaviani feels most at home is both several decades old and primarily written in French — or at least not in English. This is unfortunate, because there has been an...

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