ipse quod non exprimitur metiaris
Dante, Epistle to Cino da Pistoia
This project aims to explore how Dante’s Comedy, especially the Paradiso, treats the issue of ineffability and presents itself as an exercise in liminal writing, that is, an attempt to speak about God using human language, while constructing an authoritative figure of the writer as a God’s scribe.
The thesis examines the ways in which Dante makes both apophatic and cataphatic structures, Neoplatonic desire for union and the Aristotelian concept of actualisation interact with one another and analyses how they contribute to the shaping of the poem’s overall structure and style. The study is therefore concerned with both the linguistic and the epistemological aspects of this issue.
The traditions surveyed include: the medieval reception of the works of the sixth-century Christian Platonist, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the works of twelfth-century Alan of Lille, the use of grammatical categories in naming God and representatives of medieval mysticism.
Email: G.Addivinola@warwick.ac.uk