Dante is a poet in a special sense. One cannot and should not consider Dante as a “poet” in the ordinary and modern sense of the word. For moderns, poetry is “an expression of individual states”; it is subjective, it is limited, it is purely aesthetic. Modern aesthetics, from De Sanctis onwards, tries to detach poetry from any content, from any adherence to philosophy, morality, or anything else. To understand Dante, one must refer back to the definition that Boccaccio gives of poets: according to Boccaccio, they walk in the footsteps, that is, in the traces of the Holy Spirit: they are therefore poets if inspired by the Spirit of God.

~ Guido De Giorgio

Today we continue the translation of Guido De Giorgio’s writings, beginning with a lecture he gave introducing Dante’s Divine Comedy to high school students in Italy. The lecture provides a sweeping overview of the Comedy, and leaves the reader impressed at what must have been the level of Italy’s high school students at that time.

The full text is available on Gornahoor’s Substack, Gornahoor Press.

De Giorgio begins by emphasizing that poetry cannot be purely aesthetic, i.e. separated from Wisdom. Dante’s poem contains not only political, allegorical, and moral dimensions, but an anagogical dimension that can only be understood through experience or realization:

[The Divine Comedy] is an inexhaustible mine of truths, a teaching, a guide, an illumination that integrates, develops, and explains the obscurity of Holy Scripture, lives it, realizes it, showing its deepest meaning, the anagogical one (this term from Greek has a general sense of “to lift up”, from low to high, to instruct, to teach, to venture into deep waters) in which the literal, moral, and allegorical sense supersensibly culminate. The Comedy does not just give us religion: it gives us the essence of religion, its deepest part, its mystical, interior reality.

Or, as Tomberg says, the hermeticist “possesses the communal soul of science, religion, and art“. Through the anagogical dimension, the exoteric religious viewpoint is surpassed, although not invalidated:

Intellect of love is Wisdom, divine wisdom. Here, the purely religious viewpoint is surpassed, because while religion is a vague and general adherence to the divine, without deep commitments, without absolute dedication, without science and inquiry into the mysteries of God, Mysticism is a penetration into Divine Life, it is integrated, vibrant, lived Religion, it is a living experience of God.

By “mysticism”, De Giorgio means the active conquest of the higher states, rather than the passive enjoyment of supernaturally inspired visions, sensations, and intoxications.

The “pilgrim of Love” must uncover the divine deception, creation, and say to God, “You have hidden yourself so that I might discover You… By returning everything You’ve given me, I reject the gift and take the Giver, YOU…”. This we say is in strict evangelical application, which Dante fixes with “The Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence”; but he adds “from fervent Love”, an apparent victory of man over God, who wins while being defeated, because He allows Himself to be defeated in order to seize His attacker and incorporate him into Love… This is the secret of conquering God.

Creation is Maya, or a “divine deception”. Rather than completely rejecting Maya (like the ascetic), the knight “offers it back”, and establishes an attitude of indifference: luxury and privation become the same for him. This indifference is the freedom necessary for his conquest of higher states.

Read the full text of Guido De Giorgio’s lecture here.