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Dante, presenting his poem to Cangrande della Scala, makes immediately clear that it has to be read as a polysemous (polisemos) message. One of the most celebrated examples of what Dante means by polysemy is given by his analysis of some verses of Psalm 113: |
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In exitu Israel de Aegypto
domus barbara de populo barbaro,
facta est Judaea sanctificatio ejus etc. |
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Following medieval theory, Dante says apropos of the first verse of the Psalm: |
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If we look at the letter it means the exodus of the sons of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if we look at the allegory it means our redemption through Christ; if we look at the moral sense it means the conversion of the soul from the misery of sin to the state of grace; if we look at the mystical sense it means the departure of the sanctified spirit from the servitude of this corruption to the freedom of the eternal glory. (Epistula XIII) |
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Apparently there is nothing in this analysis which contradicts the main lines of the scriptural tradition. But many interpreters felt something uncanny. Here Dante is taking a case of biblical reading as an example of how to read his mundane poem! The most obvious solution, and it has been proposed by some interpreters, is that this letter is a forgery. It "should" be a forgery because Dante was supposed to be a faithful Thomist and this letter contradicts the Thomistic position according to which profane poetry has only a literal sense. Anyway, even given that the letter is a forgery, it has from the beginning been taken to be authentic, and this means that it did not sound repugnant to the ears of Dante's contemporaries. Moreover, the Convivio is certainly not a forgery, and in that treatise Dante provides clues for interpreting allegorically his own poemseven though still maintaining a distinction between allegory of poets and allegory of theologians, which the letter disregards. |
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In Convivio Dante explains what he intentionally meant in writing his poems. In this sense one could say that he does not detach himself from the Thomistic point of view: the allegorical sense of his poems still is a parabolic one because it represents what Dante intended to mean. On the contrary, in the letter the examples he gives make one think of blatant cases of allegoria in factis. And in other passages of the letter, as |
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