The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

In the very last canto of The Divine Comedy , Dante finally comes to unite his gaze with that of God . God is an eternally moving circle of light , and as Dante looks into it he finds at its center the image of Christ-or , literally , la nostra effige ' our image (Alighieri , 1975 This is a decisive moment : what Dante , and the reader along with him sees reflected in the revolving circle of God is his own image God is a circle with our image within itself ' and Christ being man , man is both reflected

and contained in God : through the image of Christ we see not only God , but ourselves in God . Dante is unable to find words for this moment of unsurpassed transcendence . Through this moment of unprecedented translucence , then , the desire of the poet is ultimately brought into harmony with that of the Creator , becoming itself a revolving wheel moving towards its fulfillment in God . Coinciding , as it does , with the end of the Comedy , this moment of transcendent inspiration its itself all times : a reference to a future already accomplished , which has nevertheless still to be begun , as this end in truth marks the moment which enables the beginning of the writing of the Comedy , the greatest of all allegories

The translucence with which this final scene of the Comedy is marked allows us to look upon Divina Commedia as a transubstantation , as it were , of allegory into symbol and vice versa . The valorization of the symbol that takes place at the dawn of Romanticism must of course be seen in conjunction with the redefinition of selfhood that takes place in the period . Historically a neutral term , allegory is hereby made suspicious , as being a form of representation that is somehow disassociated from the individual subject . Allegorical writing presumes a disjunction of faculties ' a distribution or dissemination of the power of understanding that has the unwanted effect of making the individual unable to grasp the significance of what is written , unless she is

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1 Dante Alighieri , The Divine Comedy . Paradiso 1 : Italian Text and Translation , tr . Charles S . Singleton (Princeton , 1975 , Paradiso XXXIII ,line 131 ,

. 378 hereafter cited in text as DC , by line number

aided by conceptual faculties other than her won senses-for instance the ideological framework of a religious or political creed , or some other system of norms codified by a social collective

We do well to bear this in mind when we consider the resurgence of interest in the concept of allegory that has taken place during the last three decades or so . Having fallen out of grace at the end of the eighteenth century , allegory has remained in disrepute throughout the major part of the twentieth century , but has now , it seems safe to say been restored as a central concept of critical and theoretical discourse

It is the aim of this to demonstrate the validity of the distinction between symbol and allegory , but to recast it as distinction between two...