As a completion of salvation history, Dante's Commedia conceives its author as a prophetic writer, who strives to communicate his divinely inspired vision of the afterworld and his knowledge of the last and ultimate things by performing an anti-Thomist revaluation of poesia. This strategy however does not lead to an absorption of the secular poetic mode by prophetically inspired speech. On the contrary, it cannot but create heavy tensions between the two poles, resulting unexpectedly in a promotion of poesia as a testimony of secular authorial exceptionality and worldly fame. This becomes especially obvious in the Paradiso, which constitutes the focus of the textual analysis of this article.
Kurt Flash is a renowned historian of medieval philosophy with a profound knowledge of poetry. In 2011, he presented an ambitious, new prose translation of Dante’s Commedia into modern German, which he concluded with a voluminous and, at the same time, provocative »invitation to read Dante «. Though in a somewhat simplified manner, Flasch understands his own interpretation of the Commedia as taking part in the tradition of Erich Auerbach’s famous »Dante as poet of the secular world«. Dante’s epic of the afterlife is read, contrary to the current understanding of themMiddle ages, as product of a culture in the process of secularization: Flasch sees the Commedia as philosophical poetry aiming at the implementation of political ethics. Flasch views Dante as promoting the self-empowerment of man - the major point of reference is an Aristotelian philosophy that skips over the Christian scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas for the sake of thinkers like Averroes, who disconnect philosophical knowledge and religious transcendence. As critic of Dante, Flasch stands in contrast to current trends in Dante scholarship, which - for good reason - focus more on the complex interplay of theological truth and fiction than on a political message.
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