Anti-Climacus

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: I occasionally permit myself to think of something besides my dissertation, and to not feel guilty for reading something other than Grotius (there's a very boring novel to be written, if it hasn't been already, on the inner life of one who's dissertating). Last night was one of those evenings (I read Blaming in one go--once again, the right book at the right point of life--and entirely justifying the purchase of the Atlantic Monthly containing a write-up on Taylor), and today I indulged as well. Ah, Dante (from Paradiso XVII):

"Therefore my dear lady [Beatrice] said to me: 'Display
the flame of your desire, that it may
be seen well-stamped with your internal seal,
not that we need to know what you'd reveal,
but that you learn the way that would disclose
your thirst, and you be quenched by what we pour"

Desire and self-knowledge, but, most importatly, the superfluity of the exchange from Beatrice's perspective. They don't need to know--they already do. But Dante has to learn how to ask, how to make sense of his own experience in order to formulate the question correctly, and be able to understand what it means to get an answer.

He is preparing to ask about the intimations he has already received in the Commedia concerning his own fate. Cacciaguida's oracle is soon to come. But, of course, all these events have already passed in Dante the author's own life--his exile, his continual disappointment in those he believes can oppose the Popes and restore order to Italy. Freccero, playing off the interaction of Dante as author and Dante as character, writes:

"The essential thing about an oracular utterance is that it contains the truth without revealing it; only in retrospect, after the fact, can its truth be appreciated... The coming of Christ changed all of this, for Christians, by providing a point of closure, and ending of time within time, an Archimedean place to stand, from which the truth in life and in world history could be judged... This mode of structuring history according to the Christ event forms the basis of Dantesque revelation in the poem: to tell the story of one's own life in retrospect with confidence in the truth and the completeness of the story is somehow to be outside of, or beyond, one's own life. It is to undergo a kind of death and resurrection, the process of conversion, a recapitulation of the Christ event in the history of the individual soul."